Rosalina Amiibo Will be Exclusive to Target

[Hairless Mammoth]

This whole limited supply and exclusive crap needs to die. Nintendo can burn money to heat their offices. They can afford to make a little more of each Amiibo and tell retail chains trying to bribe them with exclusivity rights to fuck off and get in line for their shipment. MS (and now Sony, too) are pulling game exclusivity shenanigans to get more adopters. That's tough, but acceptable. Target and other chains can have sales or offer bundles to get more customers (or build their reputations as a places that are not out to screw you). (And, if their dealings with suppliers limits how much they can knock off the price or what they can bundle together, that's what they should be negotiating.)

The only non-negative (I can't say positive.) thing about this is you don't have to buy a game twice to get Rosalina and another Amiibo. If I wanted to get a game and Gamestop's bonus DLC of an assalt rifle with purple pimp fuzz and wanted the Best Buy exclusive meathead Speisshe Mahreen in a tutu to wield the pimp gun, I'd have to buy two copies (or try to buy the code from someone who did buy it from Best Buy). There's still the downside that your forced to buy from a retailer that you might be at odds with. (I don't think Target's reputation from last year's hack has fully healed, yet. And there's always plenty of reasons people don't want to shop at certain places.)

 

[Dragonbums]

This whole limited supply and exclusive crap needs to die. Nintendo can burn money to heat their offices. They can afford to make a little more of each Amiibo and tell retail chains trying to bribe them with exclusivity rights to fuck off and get in line for their shipment. MS (and now Sony, too) are pulling game exclusivity shenanigans to get more adopters. That's tough, but acceptable. Target and other chains can have sales or offer bundles to get more customers (or build their reputations as a places that are not out to screw you). (And, if their dealings with suppliers limits how much they can knock off the price or what they can bundle together, that's what they should be negotiating.)

From what I've seen and heard around the web there seems to be 3 issues with the Amiibo thing right now.

The first and foremost ones are the scalpers. These people have enough money to buy out stock of any given "rare" Amiibo and sell them for a crap ton more on Ebay. They have been doing it a lot with Little Macs, Rosalinas, and Diddy Kong as of late (I heard nothing about Lucario.)

The second issue is that Nintendo honestly can't tell which ones will be popular or not so they are playing it safe in a sense. Nobody would of expected Diddy Kong to be a widely sought out item yet alone Nintendo. Granted I'm having faith that they did make a reasonable amount of each based on brand recognition and all that....but you know...this goes back to the first point with scalpers.

Thirdly retail chains are intentionally holding back stock, or displaying certain Amiibos in ways that make them seem like they are rare to get them out of stock fast.


It's basically the perfect storm of figurine collecting assholes, child toys consumerism, and high demand.

The only non-negative (I can't say positive.) thing about this is you don't have to buy a game twice to get Rosalina and another Amiibo. If I wanted to get a game and Gamestop's bonus DLC of an assalt rifle with purple pimp fuzz and wanted the Best Buy exclusive meathead Speisshe Mahreen in a tutu to wield the pimp gun, I'd have to buy two copies (or try to buy the code from someone who did buy it from Best Buy). There's still the downside that your forced to buy from a retailer that you might be at odds with. (I don't think Target's reputation from last year's hack has fully healed, yet. And there's always plenty of reasons people don't want to shop at certain places.)

Yeah the rise in Amiibo exclusives are starting to get ridiculous. I wonder if this is just a NoA thing since folks in other countries don't have this sort of bullshit apparently.

 

[snave]

Yeah the rise in Amiibo exclusives are starting to get ridiculous. I wonder if this is just a NoA thing since folks in other countries don't have this sort of bullshit apparently.

I'm just going to chime in here as someone quite distanced from the product. I neither collect Amiibos nor own a Wii U, yet I clicked on this article out of curiosity because my initial thought was "What a very Japanese thing to do!"

See, the idea of trawling between different retailers (or outlets or cities or prefectures) to fulfil a collection is a very commonplace thing in Japan, and people love it to bits. Everything from Pokémon figurines to varieties of Kit-Kats have sales restrictions to add some novelty factor to collecting/trying them all.

As far as benefit for Nintendo goes, there's no additional direct profit to be made from selling them this way. Rather, it's a relatively benign means to build some excitement and marketing buzz. I mean, going out to buy a bunch of things at once is a single trip: you make the trip and you quickly forget about the retail experience side of things. Spread that out over multiple trips and people feel that they're working slowly at a collection. It builds somewhat of a mythology around the product and spreads the excitement out over a longer period of time. This in turn buys Nintendo more time to produce another set without having to drum up hype again. These aren't mutually exclusive products, so the motivation behind splitting them up cannot be the same as, say, retailer-exclusive elements in games. Essentially, the retail experience comes part and parcel with the product, the same way as blind-packed trading cards.

 

[GAunderrated]

Damn we JUST got introduced to amiibos and I am already sick of their abusing limited stock practices. Sorry I am a nintendo fan but will not give them a pass for this bullshit. If EA or Ubisoft was doing this shit people would be in an up in arms over this practice.

Retail exclusive amiibos are a horrible idea because it forces consumers to either go through a shitty retail they wouldn't have normally or deal with the price hike douchebags of the internet. All in all it just sours my initial excitement of amiibos and their potential.

Nintendo has no excuse for this nonsense. They have such a huge amount of money to make more than enough stock and choose to make them limited to try and milk this new concept as much as possible. For example, Marth was sold out before it even hit the retail shelves on DAY 1.

I think I will buy my amiibo collection a year or two down the road when all this exclusive and price hiking nonsense fades away. If any of the amiibos are out of stock for good then I lose nothing before investing money in shit and running head first into this consumer mouse trap nintendo has built.

Now if you will excuse me I'm going to play skyward sword finally to see what all the fuss was about.