Earlier today EB Games announced it had some Nintendo Classic Mini NES in stock, but yeah…
They’re sold out already.
That was quick.
This is pretty insane. I wonder if we’ll ever reach a point where you can happily walk into a store and buy one of these things?
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33 responses to “And… The Nintendo Classic Mini NES Is Sold Out Again”
Took 1 hour 18 minutes for them to sell out this time, and the site didn’t crash.
OMG! IT’S A (LATE) CHRISTMAS MIRACLE!
Not too surprising really, they uploaded them in the middle of a work day with no prior announcement of it. Guessing there’s going to be lots of angry parents on their facebook/twitter/support email tonight though.
Just watched my colleague order 3, 1 to work, 1 to our work PO Box, and 1 to his home address, all under variations of his name, all paid with the same paypal. They’re not really doing a lot to enforce the 1 per person
Who actually needs three :\. Seriously
Agreed, that’s a bit of a dick move 🙁
People who want to pay for the one they keep with the money they make selling the other two 🙁
Scumbag Ebay scalpers.
tell sell it for $400 bucks
People buying by proxy for others? As I worked from home I tried to land a second for my brother.
So while we are in the minority, not all who go for the NES classic are scalpers.
I finally caved and bought one due to the hacks that have surfaced. If I don’t like it, I’ll move it on via ebay I guess.
Which hacks would they be Camm? All I heard is that you can unlock it… or brick it. It’s one or the other 😛
I’ve only seen stories saying you can hack it or brick it, no actual reports that anyone has bricked it
Interesting. What do the hacks let you do, throw any emulated NES game on there?
Yeah, pretty much. Lets you upload any NES ROM’s you may have.
Yup I’m wanting a second one to hack now that they’ve worked out how to get more games on it.
SNES is inevitable. This makes me happy.
It makes me unhappy. As someone who has missed out 5 times now on securing a Mini NES, I don’t look forward to the same thing happening again with a Mini SNES.
Might as well get a Raspberry Pi at this rate and load it with emulators.
Hopefully if they ever decide to do a SNES one they plan ahead a little better than they did this time around.
Plan a little better? I bet you the NES mini went exactly how nintendo planned it to go. There were articles about the mini NES left right and centre, people wouldnt stop talking about it and when everyone found out they couldn’t get one they all of the sudden wanted one.
Whilst they might have sold more if they had more stock available, the fact that they had so little stock got them a hell of a lot of free marketing for the “Nintendo” name.
I preordered mine through a place in the UK. Found out four months later that I would never see my item. Even purchased the 8bitdo Classic bundle for wireless controller goodness. Have since purchased a raspberry pi and can enjoy all of my old SNES games with my Bluetooth NES controller. Technology is a marvellous thing.
Clearly, the move to sell the Mini NES online only (no matter if you are EB, Target, Big W, JB, or Harvey bloody Norman) has to shoulder part of the blame here.
‘Nintendo restricts the supply’ is this generation’s ‘EA is the worst company in America’ – only because enough people are saying it do you consider it to be even remotely true.
I don’t expect to see any defences of Nintendo’s handling of stock (because, there really shouldn’t be a need for it) but we have to ask these retailers if they can devise a better way of handling such a situation.
My news feeds are today talking about possible Switch stock issues in Gamestops across US.
What is Gamestop doing?
It is letting its customers know in advance.
It’s here where the ‘need’ to own the damn thing might increase for some people. Keep in the mind this is before we even know what the manufacturer is going to be doing to convince us why we should even ‘want’ it.
That’s on Gamestop, not Nintendo.
Pre-ordering of consoles in this country is a necessary evil, how come if it’s some other company that’s just accepted?
EDIT: I realise I go too off-topic here, but my point remains the same – it’s January, and yes the major gaming retailers here may have missed the prime time period they would have liked for the Mini NES, but by word of mouth alone they could be trying a bit harder to get enough stock for the in-store shelves.
The move to online has nothing to do with it. It’s easier to manage stock levels via the online ordering system as the retailer only has to deal with what they have in one warehouse, instead of having to manage the stock levels of over a few hundred brick and mortar stores.
Nintendo doesn’t restrict supply, they underestimate demand. They did it with Amiibo’s, they did with with Pokemon gadgets, they do it with special 3DS releases. Nintendo as a business has been skating on thin ice for the last couple of generations and this has made management very worried about over-production of their latest items (as over-production means that there’s units on shelves not making them money but costing them money), to the point that it’s created an overwhelming demand that they didn’t count on. They played themselves on things like this.
Retailers are doing what they can with the units they are given. They can’t control Nintendo’s manufacturing practices. So they use whatever system they can to control the flow of units till they run out. Again, this is not a retail issue, it’s a manufacturing and management issue.
This is the best thing that GameStop has done for their customers. This time they know Nintendo are going to under-manufacture the consoles and are warning customers that they are going to be limited in stock and not all orders are going to be filled in the first shipment.
Hold up, so it’s the consumers fault that Nintendo are timid in production of their consoles? As I said above, GameStop is doing the good thing by letting consumers know that these things are limited. The problem here is on Nintendo, not the consumer or retailer.
Because unlike Nintendo, Microsoft & Sony actually produce enough consoles to cover demand and have the facility to produce more units faster than Nintendo seems to do. When the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 came out, you didn’t hear anything about units being sold out and consumers preorders not getting filled due to manufacturing not making enough. Nintendo as a habit now of not thinking ahead for demand and keep making the same mistake over and over again.
I think it’s also a case of Nintendo actually being pretty up and down in their sales performance. The Gamecube didnt do very much during it’s lifespan which meant they had to halt production at one point to get rid of the surplus. All Nintendo can do is base their next console’s sales predictions on previous performance. The Wii was next and that exploded out of nowhere. I’m sure Nintendo then overestimated their sales figures for the Wii U, because that’s done pretty poorly overall.
Nintendo have to be a bit gunshy when they release stuff, since they’ve had at least 2 occasions where they’ve failed sales wise. They had to undercut stock on the Amiibos because they were entering an already flooded market. They’ve done the same with the NES Mini and they’ll do the same with the Switch because what is the point of over-producing a console if it’s not going to sell.
Microsoft and Sony are also different cases in that they aren’t simply locked into producing gaming devices. They have other revenue streams they can lean on if necessary. Remember that at one point previously Microsoft and Sony were losing money on their consoles and making the money back off of games. Not sure if Nintendo can afford to do that.
In fairness, the Xbone and PS4 didn’t exactly fly off shelves on release. In fact both consoles had a very sluggish start due to the amount of cross platform games that were also still being released on the 360 and PS3.
And now we have upgraded models of the Sony and Microsoft platforms and a brand new platform by Nintendo. Overall, I think this has got to go down as one of the weirdest console gens in history.
IIRC the PS2 did actually have stock shortages at launch, and the PS3 had a slow start because it was hugely overpriced. The Xbox consoles have never really been massively popular during the launch window, especially given how prevalent the RRoD was for early 360 adopters.
I decided to save myself the stress and just preorder a Switch a month back. May still miss out at launch, but if I waited any longer I expect to miss all of my chances. Also, if Nintendo decides to put a $500 price on it, I simply cancel preorder and forget that the product exists.
Shit, I was gonna get one in the next few days.
Bloody hell Nintendo, it’s 2016, you knew this thing was going to do well. Stop pulling this ‘limited stock’ crap.
Is 2017.
Did anyone see if only the NES classic controllers were on sale too?
Only third party ones unfortunately
Sold out again?! You guys are completely insane EB Games has sold out the Nintendo NES Classic Mini again you should make it available in store and not online you numb nuts!
Thought about getting one of these for about 2 mins. Not worth the fuck around. What a cluster fuck
Fuck EB. There was no indication that was gonna happen. I got no notification. No one in store went “Hey! You know how you come in and ask about the Mini NES all the time? “. Can’t even get support from them as they blocked me from their Facebook site because I asked a question about their shitty practice of selling games returned within 7 days back to us at full price. So fuck EB and fuck the Mini NES. I’m done with both.