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Jimquisition: Nintendo - A Shit Distributor And Fuckheaded Toymaker (Nov. 28, 2016)

It's a novelty item targeted towards nostalgia fans. They most likely didn't spend to have a lot of production lines to make millions of units because they underestimated demand.

It's something that is going to have a very short shelf life and sell low volumes next year because it doesn't let you get new games on the system. That's why it's a novelty item.

That's all well and good but it is still a criminally undershipped novelty item.
I fail to grasp how the suits at Nintendo would believe delivering a couple units to main stream electronic outlets is acceptable.

It just screams negligence to me.
 

ggx2ac

Member
OléGunner;225629827 said:
That's all well and good but it is still a criminally undershipped novelty item.
I fail to grasp how the suits at Nintendo would believe delivering a couple units to main stream electronic outlets is acceptable.

It just screams negligence to me.

Hindsight is 20/20, etc etc.
 

Terrell

Member
OléGunner;225629827 said:
That's all well and good but it is still a criminally undershipped novelty item.
I fail to grasp how the suits at Nintendo would believe delivering a couple units to main stream electronic outlets is acceptable.

It just screams negligence to me.

Negligence? ... really?

You're also making the assumption that they do, in fact, find it acceptable. That's quite possibly the biggest assumption being made throughout the thread, that Nintendo is in some state of euphoria over this outcome, or at the very best doesn't care that they aren't able to meet the demand.

But considering they haven't got a time machine, what's done is done and whether or not they find it acceptable is largely irrelevant to the situation at hand.
 
Hindsight is 20/20, etc etc.

It always is.

Negligence? ... really?

You're also making the assumption that they do, in fact, find it acceptable. That's quite possibly the biggest assumption being made throughout the thread, that Nintendo is in some state of euphoria over this outcome.

But considering they haven't got a time machine, what's done is done and whether or not they find it acceptable is largely irrelevant to the situation at hand.

Ok ok, benefit of the doubt to you and Nintendo then. Sure lets say there is no euphoria at Nintendo at how little stock they have made of the console and they are trying their damnedest to manufacture more.

I'll be interested to see what your thoughts are if a SNES mini is released in a few years and we see the same situation unfold.
 

ggx2ac

Member
One thing to point out along with what I mentioned before. This is a novelty item targeted towards nostalgia fans. It was expected to sell to a niche audience and thus have niche sales, Nintendo underestimated demand.

However, the system is $60 and is expected to have a short shelf-life of 6-12 months because you cannot get new games on the system hence I label it as a novelty item.

It is obvious they released this for the holidays to sell because they stopped production of the Wii U, so this was something of a stopgap solution.

Considering that the system is only $60, the margins they got on it is probably equivalent to selling Wii U software. They weren't expecting to make much off of it, considering they underestimated demand means they could lose only a few million dollars if they don't meet demand.

This is far from the worst thing to happen to Nintendo, they made their biggest loss as I mentioned before on their first year with the 3DS: Overshipped, panicked, drastic price cut, went from 4mn units to 15mn units in a year but made huge losses and made their first financial loss in 30 years.
 

Chastten

Banned
OléGunner;225628689 said:
This makes no sense when a company like Nintendo probably hires people with a wealth of experience in marketing and logistics which should help estimate demand.

They don't have to produce a million NES minis (and in no way would that bankrupt them) but a little production planning and market research from a company worth more than $10bn is not inconceivable to avoid this situation.

I'm pretty sure they have (and even those can fail - see Wii U) but I'm also pretty sure all of those people are busy on Switch or new games related stuff.

My guess is that the NES Mini was simply a quick product to fill their november/holiday line-up with something besides Pokemon S/M to make a quick buck and that they never really gave it much thought, marketing or otherwise. They'd much rather see you spending your €60 on a brand new Switch game early next year than on this thing, since that'll actually benefit them in the long run.
 

Hermii

Member
I'm pretty sure they have (and even those can fail - see Wii U) but I'm also pretty sure all of those people are busy on Switch or new games related stuff.

My guess is that the NES Mini was simply a quick product to fill their november/holiday line-up with something besides Pokemon S/M to make a quick buck and that they never really gave it much thought, marketing or otherwise. They'd much rather see you spending your €60 on a brand new Switch game early next year than on this thing, since that'll actually benefit them in the long run.

Its not an either or thing. Could just as well work the other way. People buy a nes classic, it reminds them Nintendo IPs are pretty cool, then they hear Nintendo is releasing New hardware pretty soon and considers buying said hardware.
 
Nintendo does love their products to have a longer term shelf life and not overstocking is one way to achieve that to the pain of everyone though...

From that sense the toy manufacturer analogy doesn't make a lot of sense. If I've got a one hit wonder why would I under produce it?

I also see Jim will not back down on Balloon Fight :p

You guys are aware that the initial amiibo shipment was held up by the dock union strike, right?
That doesn't explain Europe and Japan which also had problems with certain figures.

I think they should have been a bit more creative with the amiibo though. Put together in China, takes months to arrive doesn't cut it here and I don't like the poses and quality of most of them so have only purchased a few.

OléGunner;225628905 said:
Thanks for that correction. My fault, I worded that last bit of my post very poorly.
Of course the NES mini innards use updated technology to emulate the old games.

My point was are these components so rare that they heavily restrict production rates?
I find that very hard to believe.
My understanding of those components were chosen because they are among the cheapest readily available components.
 

BGBW

Maturity, bitches.
Regarding the Marth Amiibo, no data model on Earth would tell you something that looks like this:

yYtQakQ.jpg


would end up being in high demand.
 
Negligence? ... really?

You're also making the assumption that they do, in fact, find it acceptable. That's quite possibly the biggest assumption being made throughout the thread, that Nintendo is in some state of euphoria over this outcome, or at the very best doesn't care that they aren't able to meet the demand.

But considering they haven't got a time machine, what's done is done and whether or not they find it acceptable is largely irrelevant to the situation at hand.
Nintendo has constantly under shipped consoles since the NES to keep demand up. This is what they do. They under ship damn near EVERYTHING and they've done that since the 80s.
 
One thing to point out along with what I mentioned before. This is a novelty item targeted towards nostalgia fans. It was expected to sell to a niche audience and thus have niche sales, Nintendo underestimated demand.

You can only be forgiven this so many times before you should be expected to account for the fact that your properties generate interest and that the demand will be high. Nintendo is either so ignorant as to be laughable or are purposefully doing it to generate further interest (and fuck over fans).
 

PSFan

Member
Nintendo has constantly under shipped consoles since the NES to keep demand up. This is what they do. They under ship damn near EVERYTHING and they've done that since the 80s.

Yeah, and that's why PS1 outsold N64 100+ mil to 30 mil and the PS2 outsold GCN 150mil to 20 mil. That strategy really works well for them huh? It really only worked for the Wii when you think about it (if that's what they actually did).
 

Fox Mulder

Member
You guys are aware that the initial amiibo shipment was held up by the dock union strike, right?


No it wasn't.

I worked retail that year. While the strike did slow everything down in general, we still got items from everyone else. Maybe that one ship only loaded with amiibo was just held back, haha.

Just an excuse, especially when the strike was over and stock still sucked. Nintendo finally caught up in recent waves but the fad had died.
 

Frodo

Member
I rather think they are incompetent at estimating demand than think they are purposefully under shipping. They are less dumb doing the former. The later is just... pure dumbness.
 
I just feel like it's a wasted of potential sales and consumer goodwill. The Wii-U pretty soundly proved that manufactured scarcity does not equal manufactured demand,. If anything, the Wii phenomenon was probably constrained by the limited supply, not spurred by it.

Nintendo caught tons of flak for trying to use the Wii as a playbook for success in terms of hardware and software development, there's no reason they shouldn't take just as much heat for trying to apply the (wrong) "lessons" of that success story to manufacturing and supply chains.
 
I'm pretty sure as far as Nintendo's undershipment is concerned all it is is they would rather not sit on a warehouse of unsold stock as the production costs wasted along with the huge storage fees make it unattractive. They would rather underproject, sell what they expect and deal with some annoyed customers than sit on millions of unsold stock.

Could they grt better at demand estimation? Yeah. Do I think it is malicious or even incompetent? No not really. It is a cost saving strategy that is ibviously very deluberate.
 

Accoun

Member
When was the Wii U ever difficult to get? When I picked up my preorder at Best Buy on day one, there were stacks of the thing just sitting there.

I remember hearing that there were only 10 WiiU consoles officially sent to Poland at launch and one of the electronic stores in my city had one. A single one. Not sure how much of it was on Nintendo's part and how much on the local distributor's.
And I think I've seen it still laying there after half a year or even later, although that might have been a different one.
 

border

Member
It's hilarious that people will accuse Nintendo of manipulating scarcity with Amiibos, even as the Toys-To-Life genre completely implodes leaving manufacturers and retailers with a bunch of useless junk stuck on shelves. It seems pretty clear Nintendo did small runs (particularly of C-tier characters) so as to keep inventory under control. Can you really blame them for not gambling on Marth?
 
My guess is that the NES Mini was simply a quick product to fill their november/holiday line-up with something besides Pokemon S/M to make a quick buck and that they never really gave it much thought, marketing or otherwise. They'd much rather see you spending your €60 on a brand new Switch game early next year than on this thing, since that'll actually benefit them in the long run.

They certainly gave a lot of thought to it, actually. Look at how they labored to re-create the look and feel of the original console. Hell, they attached the Famicom's controllers to the Famicom Mini much like the original, as crazy as that seems. They cared A LOT about emulating these games so that we could feel like we were playing them on an original NES as well.

I've played with the idea that Nintendo put these out without pre-orders in order to simulate the frustration of trying to find a console and some of the games on the list, much like they tried to force players to simulate their childhoods by sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV playing these games with the short controller cords.

This is not the most straight-forward explanation of the NES Mini shortage, but Nintendo clearly thinks about things like this, so...maybe?
 
There probably was ample supply. They probably just didn't expect demand to be so BIG. What with the Switch around the corner and all...

Which Famiclone did you have in mind?

One that has perfect emulation & one that can also run Japanese games on the SNES side.
 
When was the Wii U ever difficult to get? When I picked up my preorder at Best Buy on day one, there were stacks of the thing just sitting there.

Their shipping numbers were often short of demand for the first few months, if not the "sold out everywhere" status of the Wii. The fact that they weren't actually moving consoles just made it more problematic when they attempted to flood the channels in the following months, as they clearly had the stock ready to go and were aiming for another "drip-feed" approach that thoroughly backfired, particularly in some of the European markets, when retailers quickly lost interest in taking more stock.

If they had pushed the what they had immediately they probably could've gotten more of the bloody things off the shelves before the collective indifference of consumers turned it into a dead weight item.
 
Yeah, and that's why PS1 outsold N64 100+ mil to 30 mil and the PS2 outsold GCN 150mil to 20 mil. That strategy really works well for them huh? It really only worked for the Wii when you think about it (if that's what they actually did).

I would argue availability is more important than scarcity. No one ran out of Xbox One S bundles or PS Pros this black friday, but people couldn't find a fucking 3ds to save their lives. Further, your argument about Sony's systems are a false equivalency. The N64 and the gamecube were remarkably different consoles compared to the ps1 and ps2. Further, the PS1 outsold the n64 and the ps2 outsold the Gamecube because the game libraries for Sony's system were varied and incredibly large while Nintendo trickled out games and shit on 3rd parties.

So, in short, you're wrong.
 

Chojin

Member
What makes me sad is that when you read Scheff's Game Over it goes into detail on their much effcient, albeit reviled by Big Box Stores, distrobution network that you know they should be able to forecast properly.

I'm a huge Nintendo fan but this smells when stores get five max a month yet they can ship millions of Pokemon carts.
 
Huh, that's crazy I was just looking into why Nintendo does this a couple days ago.

I would like the buy a nes classic, but not going to go through the troubles of buying one currently.

I'm more irritated about games, before the re release of bayonetta 2, it was being sold for an extreme price.
 
When you are at the 3rd and last place in the market, you become overly conservative and afraid of even the slightest possibility of overstocking. That's just nature, especially when you are a small little cautious company named Nintendo.


Lmao. Cautious little company? Nintendo is worth 21 billion dollars. They're not a small company by any sense of the word. id say that Nintendo is bigger than both Sony's gaming division as well as microsofts Xbox division.
 

Polk

Member
I remember hearing that there were only 10 WiiU consoles officially sent to Poland at launch and one of the electronic stores in my city had one. A single one. Not sure how much of it was on Nintendo's part and how much on the local distributor's.
And I think I've seen it still laying there after half a year or even later, although that might have been a different one.
I think Lukas Toys was distributor back then, and they were terrible. Well, to be honest, every Nintendo distributor ever was terrible including current Czech one). It wasn't because Nintendo couldn't deliver consoles but becuase noone ordered them.
 
Their shipping numbers were often short of demand for the first few months, if not the "sold out everywhere" status of the Wii. The fact that they weren't actually moving consoles just made it more problematic when they attempted to flood the channels in the following months, as they clearly had the stock ready to go and were aiming for another "drip-feed" approach that thoroughly backfired, particularly in some of the European markets, when retailers quickly lost interest in taking more stock.
Holding back early and then trying to flood the channel doesn't really fit the facts. By the end of 2013 they'd shipped 3 million worldwide. 9 months later they still hadn't reached 4 million.
 
What makes me sad is that when you read Scheff's Game Over it goes into detail on their much effcient, albeit reviled by Big Box Stores, distrobution network that you know they should be able to forecast properly.

I'm a huge Nintendo fan but this smells when stores get five max a month yet they can ship millions of Pokemon carts.

Scheff also comments about forced scarcity in his book as well. Nintendo has been doing this since the 80s.
 

Turnbl

Member
Man calls a company a dick in a shouty video using Charlie Brooker cadence. Ok.

Much more interesting are two subjects not touched upon:

1) Real outrage/faux outrage because people can't get hold of a device 3 weeks after release - an emulation of a device available for the last 30 years. Also available on multiple other 3rd party devices via hardware or software emulation. A bit of playground crying going on.

2) The rise of the bot scripts is the real story here. Some stock is there, it's just sat behind x2-3 price tags on eBay. How long until a lot of targeted products end up like this? How does this industry or others (see live music/sports) stop it?

If Nintendo is purposefully keeping stock low, or misjudged demand, or is plain incompetent is purely down to them. There is also a lot of hindsight in here saying it was always going to be a hit and nobody really knew. I hovered over the cancel button a few times suffering buyer's remorse.

I'm sure everybody will end up getting one in the end. Stay strong, and as The Supremes sang - You Can't Hurry Love!
 

ggx2ac

Member
You can only be forgiven this so many times before you should be expected to account for the fact that your properties generate interest and that the demand will be high. Nintendo is either so ignorant as to be laughable or are purposefully doing it to generate further interest (and fuck over fans).

Yeah, that worked out so well for Nintendo when they overestimated demand... Like the 3DS which I posted before, 3.6mn first quarter, 700k second quarter, panicked, drastic price cut, 15mn units shipped first year and reported their first fiscal year financial loss in 30 years.

It's as though people are not seeing that they can accrue huge losses from over shipping as opposed to under shipping. Anyone remember the Udraw and how that sunk THQ?
 

SalvaPot

Member
For a recent example about Amiibo.

The first few smash waves got out of stock extremely quickly, so when Nintendo released the Animal Crossing amiibo they actually stocked them expecting them to sell lots just like the Smash amiibo did. They didn't.

The recent amiibo waves are extremely well stocked, you can still find Roy in the wild if you look for it and that is a Exclusive. But the NES mini is a whole new product, of course Nintendo was going to be conservative, they always are with untested products.
 
Intresting. So they knew exactly the demand but they undershiped anyway?

Sure, and then did the exact opposite with the 3DS and Wii U. And then did the same again with Amiibo.

So...when Nintendo has a successful product, they're evil geniuses who meticulously manage supply to keep demand high for years.

But when they have a dud, they're self-delusional morons who overship and burn retail relationships.

Uh, no. They're bad at this, all the time.
 

PtM

Banned
I don't buy it, sorry, Jim.
Let me quote NL's Thomas Whitehead.
Nintendo keeps chickening out, ultimately, preferring to keep excess stock low and take profits where it can get them. It's a strange state of affairs where the company gets surprised by success, and even with Switch it's spoken about ramping up manufacturing further in early 2017 should demand make it necessary. That worries me - why potentially start low and try to react to demand later, with the possible outcome that you fail the keep up? The Wii U and its woes, that's why, but that doesn't make it the right call.
More insights and some nice numbers at http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2016/11/soapbox_nintendo_the_nes_mini_and_ongoing_stock_problems
 
SWITCH is gonna be sold out for months, calling it now, lol.

Man, if they pull of the stupidity that was the Wii launch again with this one, I'm done and I'm not buying it period. I haven't had a Nintendo console since the Gamecube anyway, so they can fuck off it they think that's a smart plan.

Good on Jim for calling them out.l
 
Not going to watch but people need to let go of the manufactured scarcity myth.

No one is doing this on purpose in 2016, there are a number of other complex factors that affect supply and demand. Failure to meet demand costs money and the 'free marketing' it gets is not worth loss of sales.

I'm sure everbody has pointed this out by now, but this isn't a myth and Nintendo has been doing it since the NES days.
 

lenovox1

Member
Man, if they pull of the stupidity that was the Wii launch again with this one, I'm done and I'm not buying it period. I haven't had a Nintendo console since the Gamecube anyway, so they can fuck off it they think that's a smart plan.

Good on Jim for calling them out.l

4 million units is the target for the first quarter with Switch. They'll have made enough units to satisfy that. We don't know enough about how the Switch is made to know if they have any flexibility with regards to the assembly of the units.

This has nothing to do with the preposterous perceived "manufactured demand" claim.
 

ggx2ac

Member
4 million units is the target for the first quarter with Switch. They'll have made enough units to satisfy that. We don't know enough about how the Switch is made to know if they have any flexibility with regards to the assembly of the units.

This has nothing to do with the preposterous perceived "manufactured demand" claim.

Huh?

Where did you get that from? Nintendo have only given 2 million units as their forecast for the current fiscal year.
 

atr0cious

Member
I don't buy it, sorry, Jim.
Let me quote NL's Thomas Whitehead.

More insights and some nice numbers at http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2016/11/soapbox_nintendo_the_nes_mini_and_ongoing_stock_problems
These people need to walk down a store aisle and check out the Nintendo section. Most stores, at least the ones I go to, have wii and wii u games together, half the time not even separating them by hardware. The amiibos are piled on top of each other, half of them dotted with clearance tags. A wall of guitar hero live boxes sit on the corner. A novelty emulator box isn't gonna demand much space.
 
Nintendo is intentionally limiting stock during the holiday shopping season, so they can sell more units for, I dunno, Valentine's Day, I guess, and the proof is that Nintendo isn't taking preorders, because preorders are an accurate measure of how popular a product aimed at nostalgia purchases will be. It is also an absolute outrage that consumers are not allowed to exercise their right to preorder.

Do I have this right, GAF? I just want to make sure that this is what the hivemind is seriously arguing right now.
 
I'm sorry, I have said this before on other nes classic threads. But people act as if it is their god damn right to have a item day one, It's not. Companies produce items to forecasted demand. What if No one bought the system and they made 10 million of them. Who would be on the hook. You can't just say a month or two beforehand that you need to quadruple output. You need to source everything from assemblies to materiels. Also it's not like they are not making them anymore. I have managed to get two nes classics and two extra controllers with some effort, but it's not impossible. You have three options to get one right now. Go looking, pay out the ass, or the unimaginable.. wait. Either way everyone who wants one will get one. Don't fall for stupid videos like this one from someone with no understanding of how things work in the real world by subscribing to this train of thought.
 

Davey Cakes

Member
I just don't get being up in arms about this. Nintendo either underestimated demand or strategically restricted supply in order to keep the NES mini as a hot item.

I won't defend Nintendo at every corner but after they clearly overproduced Wii U systems, they should get a pass when they produce any hardware in limited quantities. Better to sell out than to have overstock. To those who haven't been able to get NES Minis, I'm sorry but it's part of wanting something that's in-demand.
 

Terrell

Member
Without a comparison to the supply chain model used by others like Sony and Microsoft, I think saying Nintendo is "incompetant" or "diabolical" is a bit bullshit, and Polygon's suggestion that there's no 3rd option is yet another example of their caliber of "garme jurnalizm". There is a 3rd option, as pointed out in this thread: "conservative to the point of being willing to sacrifice an immediate sale". There's also "announced too late from release to change their production pipeline for a product they did not expect mass popularity for", but I think I said I need to say there. Back to looking at other hardware makers and their supply chain strategy...

Sony and Microsoft could very simply have the converse strategy of consistently over-shipping product, expecting everything they make to sell through regardless. There's actually some evidence to suggest this very possibility when you look at it.

For Sony, over-shipping would historically not been an issue for them. PS1 was popular, PS2 was super-popular... it's when you look at their less-popular product that you see the issue with the inverse of the Nintendo distribution model.

PlayStation Vita. Clearly, Sony believed this would be bigger than it actually was. Retailers were simply unable to off-load inventory. By the time the Vita slim came along in 2014, retailers weren't ordering any in any decent volume, which is why the models sold out, and most retailers you went to probably still had their stock from 2012 or 2013, at best. Sony stopped publishing 1st-party games for it after the first year, clearly showed no faith in the device very shortly after launch, yet it stayed on shelves in the west for years, and are still on some shelves now. In Japan, it turned into an exclusively visual novel device almost overnight, where it took PSP at least decent amount of years to get to that point. But the key point I'm making here is this: years after Sony gave up on Vita (even if not officially) stock for Vita was still sitting on shelves. And it's pretty clear that they produced more than they sold. By a wide margin.

To a lesser degree, the earliest PS3 models were on shelves a LOT longer than they needed to be.

"But Terrell", you say, "that's supposition, albeit relatively probable. Where are the hard facts?"

The silver bullet is their worst failure, the PSP Go. Price slashes, product "relaunches", giving away games... all in an effort to get the thing off of store shelves, in every region. Sony has been quoted as wanting it to boost PSP sales with the PSP Go. As I'm sure you're aware, they never got close to that, and even had to slash their forecast for PSP as a whole for the fiscal year it launched in, partly attributed to its miserable failure. In my experience, you don't "re-launch" a product unless you have inventory that you desperately need to move. And PSP Go never did. I could still see them eating up space on retail shelves all the way up until the Vita launch, in the desperate hope someone would buy them.

But naturally, no one says anything about that being a sign of "incompetence" or whatever word we're throwing around now, because over-stocking is a retailer-facing problem, not a consumer-facing problem, and has thankfully paid off for Sony in the past. I'd bet money that retailers were PISSED about the PSP Go, the Vita and even the early days of the PS3.

It seems pretty clear to me that Sony likes to ship product in volumes that would assume they believe they'll succeed, regardless of market data or product viability. Vita is a clear indication of Sony's reaction when they don't succeed: retreat from the market and blame it, not their own assumptions that they are ordained to succeed. So if the day ever comes where their flagship Playstation consoles have a sales crater that they can't crawl their way out of.... oh, the fallout.

So we have a conservative supply chain with Nintendo and an overly-optimistic supply chain with Sony. Neither one is good, but one gets the bulk of the shit-talk because one of those more directly impacts the consumer. But both business practices have downsides, and there is no such thing as striking a perfect stock balance, unless it's by accident.
 

spineduke

Unconfirmed Member
Even if the artificial scarcity is a byproduct of Nintendos overall strategy, you'd have to be willingly in denial to say they don't notice it, or capitalize on it.
 
These people need to walk down a store aisle and check out the Nintendo section. Most stores, at least the ones I go to, have wii and wii u games together, half the time not even separating them by hardware. The amiibos are piled on top of each other, half of them dotted with clearance tags. A wall of guitar hero live boxes sit on the corner. A novelty emulator box isn't gonna demand much space.

Word?

Because I'm still collecting them, missed out on a bunch, and have never seen this.

Where should I be looking?
 

Acerac

Banned
I'm sorry, I have said this before on other nes classic threads. But people act as if it is their god damn right to have a item day one, It's not. Companies produce items to forecasted demand. What if No one bought the system and they made 10 million of them. Who would be on the hook. You can't just say a month or two beforehand that you need to quadruple output. You need to source everything from assemblies to materiels. Also it's not like they are not making them anymore. I have managed to get two nes classics and two extra controllers with some effort, but it's not impossible. You have three options to get one right now. Go looking, pay out the ass, or the unimaginable.. wait. Either way everyone who wants one will get one. Don't fall for stupid videos like this one from someone with no understanding of how things work in the real world by subscribing to this train of thought.

This reads like you didn't watch the video.
 
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