Clearly thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of gamers were sitting on the product page hammering the F5 key and some random selection thereof got their wish.
I highly doubt that. My guess is that third party resellers used bots to purchase them all.
I can confirm that this is a thing... a bigger thing than one might think. I run an IaaS cloud provider and I know off the top of my head several customers of ours who each maintain a fleet of VMs to do this for a variety of products. Eg: Limited edition shoes, show tickets, etc. Some of our customers who do this keep the VMs running and some fire them up only when needed. Some use custom software and scripts and some use purchased software designed specifically for the sites and products they want to beat others to.
I had the Amazon app open on my phone and the website on my MacBook. I added it to my cart from the app at approx 14:00:01 ET, and by the time I clicked the cart and then checkout I got an error message saying the item was sold out.
I was so pissed that this happened, because I had been planning to follow this diligently since the day it was announced, and I had no less than 3 calendar events in my phone so that my day would be replete with reminders. I had the other websites that were supposedly selling it open as well, as a failed backup plan.
In Australia, the NES Classic Edition came out on Thursday - the physical copies at Target etc. too were sold out in minutes, too. Some of the Facebook comments said that their local shop only got a few boxes which were gone mmediately: https://www.facebook.com/NintendoAUNZ/videos/714922218664914...
As usual, Nintendo doesn't get their customers and is completely unprepared.
This has been going on since the first days of ecom. It's just scripters and bots that are more easy to get ahold of now so even more people do it. But the demand is real if you look at the completed auctions! Scammers don't let the auctions complete since they have to pay fees on them. There are a shocking number of people who just don't mind paying up for something hot.
Not just eBayers using bots. They are popping up on local online garage sale pages and on Craigslist for $200+, by what appears to be soccer moms for the most part.
(Re)seller here. I got one the old fashioned way, by pounding the refresh button. I actually am unaware of a bot you speak of... do you have an example?
The key to this hustle is to never tell your friends that you got one because their con of 'it's for my kids' is incessant.
Looking at some of the eBay sales data already a few have gone for over 600.
I grok capitalism and even like it. But there are times where it is difficult to like it. In this case, people rushed to buy this product for the sole purpose of reselling it for 8x. What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense.
In the end, I think these scalpers won't sell for 8x because anintendo will just pump out more product. Still, it is sad to see this happen.
What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense.
This type of behavior is literally all around us. I recently listened to a podcast about this exact phenomenon. It featured a couple that had a special rug that drove cats crazy. They sold it on amazon for ~$35. A bunch of people bought them up and sold them on ebay for a lot more, using the drop-ship method (the reseller ordered it using their amazon account with the buyers shipping address).
When people realized they were being ripped off, they returned it to the original seller, who had to handle the claims due to requirements by amazon. They lost 10's of thousands of $$. The creator called some of the people doing this and they laughed him off, telling him they were doing nothing wrong.
It was on planet money's podcast, I think. I can try and find it if you're curious.
I feel like if you truly groked capitalism, you would be able to point out lots of its flaws, but also to realize that scalping is definitely not one of them.
With supply limited like this, the optimal social outcome is for the X units produced to go to the X people in the world who would value them most, in other words the people who would be willing to pay the most (only exception I can think of to this is if someone values it at V dollars and only has a net worth of W dollars where W < V, but for the sums we're talking about with the NES I think almost everyone either has or can scrounge up V).
In the final accounting with reselling on amazon, the goods end up where they are most highly valued. Sure, if we held a lottery to see who gets to buy the NESs at the sticker price rather than auctioning them, the people winning the lottery would be more happy than the people who end up winning the auction. But as a whole, society would be impoverished since it's an inefficient distribution (no room to prove it in a HN post, but it's not too hard to work out on paper when tallying up the welfare of nintendo, the scalpers and all the people who get to buy the NES under one scenario or the other).
How is this "morally bankrupt"? It's just smart. Every business on earth would do this in there sector if they had the chance.
What's wrong with a smart and clever individual buying this to resell at 8x? It's not hurting anyone, it's just a stupid retro console.
What's wrong with society? People are struggling and getting screwed over by governments and big business, they badly need income and here is a small opportunity to get a piece of that pie.
Ultimately someone that wants the product who is happy to pay the price that it is sold for, because they deem it worth that price, ends up with the product in there life. And someone else manages to profit to, to gain some much needed income so they can purchase something they want in there life.
Hardly morally bankrupt. There is no change in the outcome here. There are still the same amount of people with these consoles, enjoying them as before. Nobody is hurt.
In fact you could argue that someone doing this is a net gain, because two people gain instead of one. Someone made a profit that wouldn't otherwise and someone got the console they wanted (and obviously didn't care about the price)
Investing money in something that is nigh-guaranteed to have excellent returns is very good sense for anyone with the time and effort to spend on reselling the product.
Agreed. It's quite sad that the impetus is on Nintendo to flood the market with product. As of this post, there were 3,800+ posts on eBay[1]; there's at least an entire page-full listing Buy It Now @ $1000 or more.
This is one way that markets clear prices when demand edges production. There's are many ways to do it, for example auctions. In this case the price sensitivity of the market is lower than the producer set, so the market is willing to pay more for the good than the product is selling it at.
When this pricing mismatch happens, there is the ability to close the pricing gap through repricing by a third party otherwise known as arbitrage.
This is one of the more important functional requirements for a market and the producer can take advantage of this based on how they price. Nintendo could have priced the system much higher and seen the same output but it may not have made as big if a splash, so really it's Nintendo driving this frenzy because they and all other major companies are good at this.
It's not a big it's a feature (really in this case).
I really don't see why Nintendo didn't produce a bit more on launch - I mean, they're not some kickstarter newbie - don't they have some skills in demand-forecasting?
> What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense.
I don't know, but I shun, punish (by refusing to do business with them) and counter-market such people whenever I can. It's one thing to take a good and resell it for a larger price to a different audience; you're in essence making it more accessible and also take on some distribution headache, and thus deserve to cash in. That's how almost every brick and mortar store works. But it's another thing to buy off someone's stock only to turn around and resell it for more to the same customer base. That's, in my opinion, just plain sliminess.
> What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense.
In the end, I think these scalpers won't sell for 8x because anintendo will just pump out more product. Still, it is sad to see this happen.
Morally? It's a video game. Scalpers are fine. Blame Nintendo for not making more of them or charging a higher price so the limited supply met demand. Everyone will have their NES Classic in a month or two.
It might not have seemed that way in writing, but in reading your post is contradictory. If the motivation for a person to do this is lost on you, you don't grok capitalism; and if that bothers you, you don't like capitalism.
What exactly is "morally bankrupt" about buying a mispriced good and reselling it at a proper price?
People get very morally righteous about scalping, but I don't understand why at all. Resellers are correcting a distortion in the market and providing a value-added service.
I wonder if these things are timed for release once a target audience hits a certain age? What is that age?
It was about 8 years between 1st gen consoles (Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision) and 2nd gen (Nintendo). The retro-rerelease of 1st gen was about 8 years ago. I am 45 and am nostalgic about 1st gen. I was in high school for 2nd gen; no nostalgia, uninterested.
So do these retro-rerelease target those in their late 30's. Mid life crisis yearning for nostalgia?
It seems silly to me to allocate a product by the vageries of refresh rates and server responsiveness.
It seems like Amazon could come up with many other ideas for allocating a limited product. There's no rule that says it has to be based on the millisecond ordered.
For example how about a game of chance (or skill?) to let people compete for the product? It would feel a lot more fulfilling than an error page. And it would give them good brand interaction.
It'd be one thing if the product just came out, had a lot of media fanfare and sold out due to low volume. I mean that's reality right. But the fact that it appeared in weekly ads for stores all over the country. It's really expectation that hurts the most.
That's just causing hassle, distrust. Retail employees probably don't lke to get 50 extra calls a day for a product that will be in stock for 14 seconds. If I were a regional mgr I'd put VERY heavy pressure on corporate for say Target to NOT show ads for this product until reasonable levels of stock are guaranteed. Targets around the country got about 11 units. The one I went to only had 1 spare controller. Keep in mind that a good portion of the NES games are co-op.
There are 1800 target stores in the U.S. If they all got 11 units that means there were only 19,000 units for that store. I heard gamestops got about 5. Walmarts got about 6 units each.
So 6 units to walmarts 5229 stores is about 31375 unit.
Gamestops 4,434 stores at 5 units each get 21700
Who knows what amazon stocked at. Would it be reasonable to say amazon got 10000 units? I mean they sold out in a minute. Maybe it was less than that.
So those totals add up to 82,075 units. Let's round up, not forgetting the Best Buys, Microcenters, mom-pop shops and The 800 Toys R Us stores in the U.S. and say the United States got maybe 112,000 units total for the release.
Nintendo needs to come out with an official retro wifi appliance that allows one to buy classic games from an App Store and play 2 player games over the network.
The little machine is nice, but I wish they simply had some kind of an app store for old game ROMs. I would pay the price of a mobile game for old Mario Bros etc. Instead I have to download them from shady sources.
This kind of stuff is par for the course with Nintendo hardware from what I can tell. Is it deliberate? If so, does perceived scarcity drive more sales, or are they just sick of warehousing unsold products?
I had the chance to buy one yesterday morning and I didn't take it up. That was my first hearing about it and I gotta say, beyond resell value I don't see the appeal of this thing.
You can make a smaller NES with a Pi Zero and rented time on a 3D printer. I don't think people would have a problem trading use of cartridges for a much larger, cross platform selection.
All of these outages could be prevented by opening sales randomly in time windows and in small waves. Or with preordering. The same applies to sales with price reductions, etc. All these companies shoot themselves in the foot with stunts like that. Why not make it more expensive if there is such a demand, anyway?
idk what happened but at 1400PST on the money i loaded it... "add to cart" and "buy now" buttons were there but their function was inoperable. That page was broken for hours after that. And now it just says not available. ugh
i continuously got an empty shopping cart everytime i tried to add it.
i am pretty sure the site was hit so hard they just 404'd the URL so it wouldn't load anything. for a while the item page was blank while amazon.com continued to load.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|9 years ago|reply
I highly doubt that. My guess is that third party resellers used bots to purchase them all.
Why wouldn't tc come to the same conclusion?
Edit. yep here's one on eBay for $500+:
http://m.ebay.com/itm/New-Nintendo-NES-Classic-Edition-Conso...
[+] [-] mikiem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mangeletti|9 years ago|reply
I had the Amazon app open on my phone and the website on my MacBook. I added it to my cart from the app at approx 14:00:01 ET, and by the time I clicked the cart and then checkout I got an error message saying the item was sold out.
I was so pissed that this happened, because I had been planning to follow this diligently since the day it was announced, and I had no less than 3 calendar events in my phone so that my day would be replete with reminders. I had the other websites that were supposedly selling it open as well, as a failed backup plan.
I should have written a script.
[+] [-] a_bonobo|9 years ago|reply
As usual, Nintendo doesn't get their customers and is completely unprepared.
[+] [-] minimaxir|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robk|9 years ago|reply
Disclosure: I did it in college for beer money - http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/17/us/sony-toy-is-less-costly...
[+] [-] NetStrikeForce|9 years ago|reply
Actually Amazon itself has listing from 3rd party sellers at crazy prices.
I was tempted to buy one, even at ~£70. Then I looked at my desk and saw my Rapsberry Pi with this case http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3D-Printed-NES-inspired-Raspberry-... and a USB NES control replica and decided to forget about the mini NES.
[+] [-] cpayne|9 years ago|reply
I mean, how many would they have made? 2,000?
They know they can do a second run before Christmas. By then they would know if they should make 20,000 or 200,000...
[+] [-] savanaly|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubyfan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morganvachon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bduerst|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gm-conspiracy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csulmone|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ecommerceguy|9 years ago|reply
The key to this hustle is to never tell your friends that you got one because their con of 'it's for my kids' is incessant.
Looking at some of the eBay sales data already a few have gone for over 600.
Yay for me!
[+] [-] typicalrunt|9 years ago|reply
In the end, I think these scalpers won't sell for 8x because anintendo will just pump out more product. Still, it is sad to see this happen.
[+] [-] e40|9 years ago|reply
This type of behavior is literally all around us. I recently listened to a podcast about this exact phenomenon. It featured a couple that had a special rug that drove cats crazy. They sold it on amazon for ~$35. A bunch of people bought them up and sold them on ebay for a lot more, using the drop-ship method (the reseller ordered it using their amazon account with the buyers shipping address).
When people realized they were being ripped off, they returned it to the original seller, who had to handle the claims due to requirements by amazon. They lost 10's of thousands of $$. The creator called some of the people doing this and they laughed him off, telling him they were doing nothing wrong.
It was on planet money's podcast, I think. I can try and find it if you're curious.
[+] [-] savanaly|9 years ago|reply
With supply limited like this, the optimal social outcome is for the X units produced to go to the X people in the world who would value them most, in other words the people who would be willing to pay the most (only exception I can think of to this is if someone values it at V dollars and only has a net worth of W dollars where W < V, but for the sums we're talking about with the NES I think almost everyone either has or can scrounge up V).
In the final accounting with reselling on amazon, the goods end up where they are most highly valued. Sure, if we held a lottery to see who gets to buy the NESs at the sticker price rather than auctioning them, the people winning the lottery would be more happy than the people who end up winning the auction. But as a whole, society would be impoverished since it's an inefficient distribution (no room to prove it in a HN post, but it's not too hard to work out on paper when tallying up the welfare of nintendo, the scalpers and all the people who get to buy the NES under one scenario or the other).
[+] [-] childifchaos|9 years ago|reply
What's wrong with a smart and clever individual buying this to resell at 8x? It's not hurting anyone, it's just a stupid retro console.
What's wrong with society? People are struggling and getting screwed over by governments and big business, they badly need income and here is a small opportunity to get a piece of that pie.
Ultimately someone that wants the product who is happy to pay the price that it is sold for, because they deem it worth that price, ends up with the product in there life. And someone else manages to profit to, to gain some much needed income so they can purchase something they want in there life.
Hardly morally bankrupt. There is no change in the outcome here. There are still the same amount of people with these consoles, enjoying them as before. Nobody is hurt.
In fact you could argue that someone doing this is a net gain, because two people gain instead of one. Someone made a profit that wouldn't otherwise and someone got the console they wanted (and obviously didn't care about the price)
[+] [-] salmonet|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crooked-v|9 years ago|reply
Investing money in something that is nigh-guaranteed to have excellent returns is very good sense for anyone with the time and effort to spend on reselling the product.
[+] [-] metaphor|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.ebay.com/sch/?_nkw=nes%20classic%20edition
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|9 years ago|reply
When this pricing mismatch happens, there is the ability to close the pricing gap through repricing by a third party otherwise known as arbitrage.
This is one of the more important functional requirements for a market and the producer can take advantage of this based on how they price. Nintendo could have priced the system much higher and seen the same output but it may not have made as big if a splash, so really it's Nintendo driving this frenzy because they and all other major companies are good at this.
It's not a big it's a feature (really in this case).
[+] [-] r00fus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|9 years ago|reply
I don't know, but I shun, punish (by refusing to do business with them) and counter-market such people whenever I can. It's one thing to take a good and resell it for a larger price to a different audience; you're in essence making it more accessible and also take on some distribution headache, and thus deserve to cash in. That's how almost every brick and mortar store works. But it's another thing to buy off someone's stock only to turn around and resell it for more to the same customer base. That's, in my opinion, just plain sliminess.
[+] [-] matwood|9 years ago|reply
Morally? It's a video game. Scalpers are fine. Blame Nintendo for not making more of them or charging a higher price so the limited supply met demand. Everyone will have their NES Classic in a month or two.
[+] [-] inimino|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nilved|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z3t4|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morgante|9 years ago|reply
People get very morally righteous about scalping, but I don't understand why at all. Resellers are correcting a distortion in the market and providing a value-added service.
[+] [-] mrfusion|9 years ago|reply
Or why not first release an expensive limited edition while they scale up production?
[+] [-] madengr|9 years ago|reply
It was about 8 years between 1st gen consoles (Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision) and 2nd gen (Nintendo). The retro-rerelease of 1st gen was about 8 years ago. I am 45 and am nostalgic about 1st gen. I was in high school for 2nd gen; no nostalgia, uninterested.
So do these retro-rerelease target those in their late 30's. Mid life crisis yearning for nostalgia?
[+] [-] mrfusion|9 years ago|reply
It seems like Amazon could come up with many other ideas for allocating a limited product. There's no rule that says it has to be based on the millisecond ordered.
For example how about a game of chance (or skill?) to let people compete for the product? It would feel a lot more fulfilling than an error page. And it would give them good brand interaction.
[+] [-] michaelbuddy|9 years ago|reply
That's just causing hassle, distrust. Retail employees probably don't lke to get 50 extra calls a day for a product that will be in stock for 14 seconds. If I were a regional mgr I'd put VERY heavy pressure on corporate for say Target to NOT show ads for this product until reasonable levels of stock are guaranteed. Targets around the country got about 11 units. The one I went to only had 1 spare controller. Keep in mind that a good portion of the NES games are co-op.
There are 1800 target stores in the U.S. If they all got 11 units that means there were only 19,000 units for that store. I heard gamestops got about 5. Walmarts got about 6 units each.
So 6 units to walmarts 5229 stores is about 31375 unit. Gamestops 4,434 stores at 5 units each get 21700
Who knows what amazon stocked at. Would it be reasonable to say amazon got 10000 units? I mean they sold out in a minute. Maybe it was less than that.
So those totals add up to 82,075 units. Let's round up, not forgetting the Best Buys, Microcenters, mom-pop shops and The 800 Toys R Us stores in the U.S. and say the United States got maybe 112,000 units total for the release.
[+] [-] joshbaptiste|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkstar999|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gm-conspiracy|9 years ago|reply
There will be limited availability for a short time, then a flood of product.
[+] [-] strikeZ|9 years ago|reply
This is the headline I am seeing at the moment. Seems like the guy who was supposed to update the time forgot to do so.
[+] [-] Waterluvian|9 years ago|reply
At an impulse buy price point, I wonder how many unrecoverable lost sales are caused by lack of supply.
[+] [-] elcapitan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oxide|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenmountin|9 years ago|reply
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Video-Game-Projector-PGS-Con...
Available cheap for another 8 hours, maybe something to tide them over?
[+] [-] fuqted|9 years ago|reply
You can make a smaller NES with a Pi Zero and rented time on a 3D printer. I don't think people would have a problem trading use of cartridges for a much larger, cross platform selection.
Is this a business opportunity?
[+] [-] Kenji|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yayitswei|9 years ago|reply
Nintendowned: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in (null) seconds
[+] [-] cube00|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chuckreynolds|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swang|9 years ago|reply
i am pretty sure the site was hit so hard they just 404'd the URL so it wouldn't load anything. for a while the item page was blank while amazon.com continued to load.