Nintendo Switch

The benefit of the doubt is lost when they "underestimate demand" habitually, and refuse to reprint amiibos or restock consoles like the NES Classic either at all, or until well after they're out of stock for months or years at a time.

Amiibos aren't literally microtransactions, but in many ways they're worse, depending on the game and how readily available they are. You can't access hard mode in the Metroid 2 remake without a Samus Amiibo, or certain advertised features in Breath of the Wild, Shovel Knight, and other titles without them, either.

Edited by Hashil on Nov 11th 2018 at 5:39:12 AM

Are you seriously complaining that you can't use features advertised to use amiibo without using amiibo? That's a bit like complaining that you can't use advertised DLC items without purchasing the DLC.

No.

But one of the points argued in favor of Nintendo over its competitors was their lack of microtransactions. Theirs are just tied to physical items you can look at, and some instances due to their refusal to reprint them trying to find one after the fact can cost you much more than it initially did, unlike traditional microtransactions generally maintaining static prices.

They're not microtransactions though. They cost fifteen dollars.

Uh... I don't think Nintendo's habit of undersupplying retailers is part of their scheme. They don't get money from scalpers, and they don't sell out-of-stock amiibos at a premium (or at all) from their own online store, as far as I'm aware. It legitimately sounds like Nintendo has trouble manufacturing these, as well as their mini consoles, because they didn't get enough money from the Wii U era and had to pour their resources into manufacturing the Switch. Supply both for amiibos and the mini consoles as been more stable since the Switch took off.

I agree, broadly, that amiibos are an exploitative moneymaking scheme. The exclusives locked behind them are generally not worth the price (probably the most substantial exclusive tied to an amiibo is Wolf Link in BOTW, which should be $5 DLC at most). While I admit that amiibos do have value as collectors' items, not everybody who gets amiibos are collectors; some people just want to play Return of Samus on Fusion difficulty, and have to weigh not being able to do that against splurging a ludicrous $15 on a toy that they might not have any other use for.

"Microtransactions (sometimes abbreviated as MTX) are a business model where users can purchase virtual goods via micropayments."-Wikipedia(not the best but whatever). It doesn't change your point, but Amiibo are not microtransactions.

Yeah, I will say that locking anything that isn't a cosmetic behind the amiibos isn't cool, at least not if it isn't available via some other cheaper method. Like having an amiibo exclusive costume that doesn't really have any unique function isn't a big deal to me. Stuff that actually has gameplay repercussions should be available (like Epona and Wolf Link from BOTW) or bundled in with additional DLC or something.

But yeah, still not micro-transactions. Micro-transactions would be stuff like "oh, Link is out of arrows. Would you like to pay 99c to replenish them?"

Edited by JapaneseTeeth on Nov 11th 2018 at 7:19:11 AM

As far as I'm concerned I buy amiibos because I want the cool figurine to leave on top of my furniture, and they work well when they treat themselves as collection items that just so happen to give you a neat unimportant thing in game(s).

I won't defend using them to gate a significant part of the game like dificulty (Metroid SR) or challenges (Splatoon 1), but when they just give stuff likea few pieces of gear in a game already bursting with them (Splatoon 2) or something neat but majorly insignificant like an custom NPC combatant (Super Smash Bros) they are cool.

And yes, microtransactions they are not. To call 15 buck figures that can give you stuff in multiple games without additional strings attached and that can be used in multiple consoles and accounts "microtransactions" is not appropiate.

Edited by Elbruno on Nov 11th 2018 at 10:24:40 AM

I think if Nintendo were to make Amiibo's any more important than they currently are, those pirated NFC chip cards you can buy online would become much more popular.

As it is, I don't really have any issue with Amiibo's, given the content is very rarely essential.

I do however, sorta regret buying so many of the clearance Smash Bros Amiibo.

I just don't have any room on my shelf for them :P

If you have spares I'll take them.

With the whole amiibo drought shortly after they release, because reprints seem to be scarce at times, I had a though that since they've got the Nintendo Switch app and many phones have NFC built in; Digital amiibo? Oh, and make them much cheaper than the actual ones, since you don't get the cool figurine. (At most a 3D model viewer)

Just boot up the app, select your amiibo and scan your phone. Should even work with Wii U and 3DS if the NFC coding is done right, correct?

(This way there would also not be "sell amiibo content seperately for each game in didigtal packs" or whatever how some people have asked amiibo content to just be DLC at times as an option.)

Yeah, that's a cool idea. That way, the functionality is available to everybody, leaving the physical amiibos for people who want the figurines.

And perhaps there could also be a mid-range option of NFC amiibo cards. I know they did a Shadow Mewtwo card as a pack-in with Pokkén Tournament and there was a range of Animal Crossing trading cards, but let's have full Nintendo-themed hanafuda and tarot decks with NFC functionality.

I mean, the amiibo function into the Switch app idea has a flaw though; people with cheaper phones.

Maybe... An amiibo card that you can save different amiibo data on by using the eshop? This sounds a bit more difficult to do and a lot more exploitable to hackers though.

There's already apps that spoof amiibo, something official that lets you scan something other than an amiibo is pretty unlikely

Nintendo underselling their product is absolutely done on purpose, and it's a good business decision and one that's consistently used.

If you sell a product with a presupposed unlimited stock, then you might sell 86K of said products.

If you sell a product and advertise (And make it clear) that there's only 100K of that product, you will sell all 100K.

It's a method of guaranteeing profits, even at the cost of the consumer. Nintendo is very aware of scalpers and the like, but they don't lose anything from scalpers because they sold all of their product anyway.

Then at a later date they might release said product again, like in the case of the NES and SNES classics, or they might not.

The only time that I believe Nintendo genuinely didn't have the stock/expect demand was the Switch, and that's more because there's evidence behind the Wii U not selling well and smartphones requiring the Nividia chip Switches used (and even then I have no doubt that Nintendo would've pushed similarly limited quantities anyway.

At any rate amiibo aren't microtransactions by definition. They have a real physical product attached to them. I'm also against the notion that amiibos shouldn't be giving exclusive content, given that's the reward for buying the amiibo (tho I do agree that they should be largely relegated to costumes and/or made WAY more available).

Edited by EpicBleye on Nov 12th 2018 at 1:15:57 PM

I understand that some companies use limited edition runs as a quick and safe moneymaking option, but what happened with the amiibos and mini consoles is missing a few crucial elements that define a limited run scheme:

• Neither the amiibos nor the minis were advertised as being of limited stock. Nintendo acknowledged their stock issues in interviews, but there were never any official "Get them before supplies run out!" promos, to my knowledge.
• The main point of a limited edition run is to use the high demand to jack up prices far beyond what people would spend for the same product in more normal circumstances. The consoles and the amiibos (looking at amiibos' values as figurines, not just for their gameplay features) were reasonably priced (though I still feel the earlier amiibos were a bit low in quality for the price tag, the price wasn't anywhere near being unambiguously "ripoff" levels of overpriced).
• Reprints were not treated any differently from the first editions of each console or amiibo. Generally, and especially for video games, a first/special/premium edition is played up for its collector's value to distinguish it from the standard edition, in order to get people to buy them immediately instead of waiting for a sale. Neither amiibos nor the consoles had that kind of push at launch.

I mean, I'm not going to deny that this could be a covert, masterful chess game on Nintendo's part to sell limited editions without giving away that they're limited editions, but I don't really see what the point would be. Nintendo would've seen how much people were spending on scalped products after the first run of amiibo. If they wanted to capitalize on that, it would have been smarter and more effective to raise the prices or just sell more stock. That they didn't do that suggests that yes, they really did have trouble manufacturing these.

Yeah, I never understood people that said that Nintendo deliverately undersupplies in some kind of bizarreconomics scheme. Undersupplying deliberately with a reasonably priced product just means that the supplier sells less product and makes less money from all the unmet demand, especially with scalpers added into the equation that artificually increase the price on the product without the supplier winning anything.

Edited by Elbruno on Nov 12th 2018 at 5:10:03 PM

Jim Sterling started that meme when the NES Classic Mini was in super-short supply. The idea is that by supplying an uber-popular product in limited numbers, you drive up demand and interest, and so sell more units later when you release a bigger production run.

That said, I still think Hanlon's Razor applies; based on the information available, it's more plausible that Nintendo is basing its business plan on the most conservative sales forecasts it has.

I'm apparently the only person on the Internet who works in manufacturing, so let me drop some anecdotal evidence from personal experience. It's impossible to make more than a certain number of units in a given time. Hiring more workers won't help much, because the production lines are almost entirely automated; the limiting factor is the speed of the machines, not the number of people. And you can't just install more production lines, because there is a finite amount of space available.

My factory makes surgical implants; while demand fluctuates throughout the year, it stays pretty consistent. Despite this, we still sometimes have to push ourselves at the end of the month to meet shipping requirements. Nintendo is in the entertainment industry, where that kind of guarantee does not exist. Sure, you can make reasonable inferences based on past results, but it's ultimately impossible to predict what will be a bit and what will be a flop.

Regarding amiibos specifically, the first ones were released in 2014. Nintendo was in a bad state at the time; the Wii U was flopping hard, though the 3DS was still a decent success. Nobody outside the Kyoto headquarters had any notion about the Switch; indeed, the conversation surrounding Nintendo was that the Wii U would be their last home console, and soon they would either go third-part or just make handhelds (which I guess they technically did, but not in a way that anybody predicted). The Wii U ha built-in amiibo compatibility, but hardly anybody owns one. To use an amiibo with a 3DS, you need to buy a seperate adaptor. If I was a forecaster with Nintendo at the time, I would also have predicted that amiibos would be a modest success at best.

The NES Classic Mini does look like deliberate undersupplying, until we compare it to the SNES Classic Mini. The SNES Classic Mini did face supply issues, but nowhere near as bad as those of the NES; after the first wave was snapped up in pre-orders, a second wave was immediately planned. This all looks like Nintendo learned its lesson from the NES and had a contingency plan in place for if the SNES was more popular than expected, to the point that scalpers actually got burned when people were able to get units at retail price; if Nintendo were deliberately undersupplying to drive up demand, the supply issues would have been more similar.

One final point. Another issue Mr. Sterling rails against is over-inflated sales forecasts. A game can sell 8 million copies in its opening weekend, making billions of dollars in profit, and still be considered a failure that warrants firing the CEO because it was forecast to sell 10 million in the same time frame. This kind of reckless confidence led to the collapse of Sega when they tried to sell more copies of Shenmue than there were Dreamcast owners. Atari did the same thing with ET the Extraterrestrial in 1982 and the same thing happened, except more severe - Atari were destroyed, and they took the entire American game market with them, and indeed it was Nintendo that resurrected that part of the media landscape.

Given all that, while it's certainly possible Nintendo is trying some sort of economic Xanatos Gambit where they either reduce their losses or make big profits, it's more likely they're just being overly cautious, which is understandable given their track record with home consoles. No conspiracy, just corporate banality.

Edited by VampireBuddha on Nov 12th 2018 at 3:58:57 PM

Yeah, in general I think it's much more likely that Nintendo is just trying to minimize losses in case something doesn't sell as well as they think it will. They may well benefit from the additional publicity over it, but I'm guessing that's just a bonus rather than what they were aiming for from the start.

It's also worth noting that one of the most infamous cases of an amiibo being short-stocked were the Splatoon amiibos, and that honestly looks like a pretty similar case of Nintendo just being cautious. Splatoon's popularity caught a lot of people off guard, what with being a new IP on an unpopular console in a genre that Nintendo had never attempted that also happens to be generally unpopular in Japan.

I learned a lot, thanks for sharing.

Well put. We take Splatoon's popularity for granted now, but back before its release I don't think anyone expected it to become as much of a success as it did, even managing to outsell every individual Metroid entry.

As for the NES Classic, if I was a market analyst and they told me to forecast how well would a little console reminiscent of a 30 year old console containing only 20 games of a vast library that is so lightweight you could fit them all and play them on a device nearly all of the target demographic has in their pockets perform in the market, I'd sure be conservative with my estimations.

No one could've seen the NES Classic performing as well as it did.

Edited by Elbruno on Nov 13th 2018 at 8:56:17 AM

Some people did, and preordered way before the demand skyrocketed.

Also I think one of the main points here is just that Jim Sterling needs to get off his high horse.

Eh, I still think that Jim is right significantly more often than he's wrong.

I always knew it was going to be a hit. It's a shooter and a quirky, kid-friendly one at that. There were plenty of people who thought it was going to bomb but those were a vocal minority.

It was being released on the Wii U and it was the first attempt Nintendo took at making a shooter.

I never expected it to fail, but I did think that it would perform okay but not great, like ARMS a couple of years later. Instead, it turned into a runaway success.