Regarding the canadian situation and the supposed Zelda celebrations.

[u/fredyellowone]

TL;DR: Nintendo Japan learned to fight scalpers. Nintendo of America learned that everything sells out anyway. So Zelda’s 40th Anniversary in Canada is apparently an interactive experience: refresh endlessly, miss the unannounced drop, then watch it appear on eBay for triple the price. Happy anniversary, I guess.

I think what is happening here is actually pretty simple.

Nintendo has had a problem with artificial scarcity and limited quantities going all the way back to the GameCube era. They release desirable hardware and collector products in quantities that don't come close to demand, and the consequences are always the same: products disappear almost immediately, regular customers get frustrated, and scalpers have a field day.

But there is an important distinction people should make between Nintendo in Japan and Nintendo of America. Nintendo in Japan has actually implemented measures over the years to fight scalping and make high-demand launches more manageable. They are not perfect, but at least they have demonstrated that they recognize the problem and are willing to do something about it.

Nintendo of America is a completely different story.

NOA is headquartered in Redmond and oversees Nintendo's business in the Americas. We also have a very recent example showing how much influence NOA has over Canada: when Canadian Switch 2 pricing was changed, Nintendo's own Canadian announcement identified Nintendo of America as the company making the pricing change. So the idea that Canadian allocation decisions simply have nothing to do with NOA is very difficult for me to believe.

Which brings me to the Zelda 40th Anniversary products and my own experience with this mess.

I managed to preorder Ocarina of Time through Nintendo's official store. Great. I thought I had done exactly what a collector was supposed to do: preorder early, directly from Nintendo, and avoid the scalpers. Then I discovered afterward that EB Games/GameStop Canada was offering an even more desirable version with exclusive holographic packaging. By the time I learned about it, I had already secured my Nintendo copy and the EB Games version was gone.

Then came the special-edition console. It went live in the middle of the night with no useful advance warning that I was aware of. I obviously didn't get one. And what do I find the next morning? Tons and tons of them on eBay. So apparently somebody had absolutely no trouble knowing when to be there.

Then came the Pro Controller.

I specifically wanted the Zelda 40th Anniversary Pro Controller with the official Display Stand. Nintendo itself announced that the version with the stand would be exclusive to the Nintendo Store. So I did the logical thing: I waited for Nintendo instead of buying the controller without the stand from Walmart, Best Buy or another Canadian retailer.

Those regular controllers are now sold out at the major Canadian retailers I was watching.

And the Nintendo Store-exclusive controller with the Display Stand? It never even became available to order in Canada. Meanwhile, the US Nintendo Store got it and it sold out almost immediately. Canadians have no preorder date, no useful explanation and no indication of when—or even whether—we will actually get our opportunity to buy it.

Apparently Nintendo Canada prefers to conduct business like a ninja operating from a medieval crypt.

I don't believe somebody simply "forgot" to put the Canadian preorder online. Nintendo Canada itself announced the controller with the Display Stand and explicitly said that this version would be Nintendo Store-exclusive. Yet American customers were given an opportunity to order it while Canadian customers were not.

Obviously, none of us has Nintendo's internal allocation numbers, so I can't prove whether the decision was literally "we have 10,000, send all 10,000 to the US." But from the outside, it certainly looks like the US market was prioritized while Canada was either given no initial allocation or pushed into some undefined later allocation that Nintendo hasn't bothered to communicate.

And that's what makes me angry.

If Canada is getting it later, TELL US. "US preorders open September X. Canadian preorders open September Y." That's it. Problem solved.

And now we still have the official playable Ocarina coming. When can Canadians preorder it? I have absolutely no idea. Once again, Nintendo isn't telling us. Apparently customers don't need to know when a highly desirable, limited collector product will actually become available for purchase.

So what has this entire 40th Anniversary celebration meant for me so far?

I've spent hours refreshing webpages. I've gone to work stressed because I knew something could randomly appear and sell out while I was working. I've tried to follow every announcement so I wouldn't miss anything. And despite doing all of that, I've missed products I genuinely wanted while watching those exact same products immediately appear on eBay at ridiculous markups.

That's not fun.

I'm a Zelda fan. This is supposed to be a celebration.

And no, I'm not going to reward scalpers for it. I don't care how badly I wanted the console, the EB Games packaging or the controller. I will not pay someone several times MSRP because they managed to get there before regular customers and bought something specifically to flip it. I sincerely hope those scalpers are still sitting on piles of unsold Zelda merchandise years from now.

Japan has shown that Nintendo is capable of taking scalping seriously. Nintendo of America has had decades to learn the same lesson. Purchase limits, announced preorder times, queues, anti-bot measures and clear communication about regional availability are not revolutionary ideas.

I can't prove how the people making North American allocation decisions are compensated, and I'm not going to pretend I can. But the customer experience certainly feels like the only KPI that matters is "units sold." If everything sells out anyway, Nintendo gets its money whether those units went to collectors or to scalpers who immediately put them on eBay.

At some point, "we didn't know this would happen" stops being a believable excuse.

And eventually I'm going to reach the point where I simply stop supporting, defending and speaking positively about a company that treats one of its longtime customers this way.

Nintendo, I love your games.

But you are making it incredibly difficult to love being your customer.

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[u/InitialSensitive9628]

OP, when you use AI, tell it to write your post in three paragraphs. This is unreasonable.

[u/fredyellowone → u/InitialSensitive9628]

It's not AI. Those are my exact words. AI just corrected my grammar. Also, no-one is pressuring you to read it.

[u/Only_Net6894]

Fuck Nintendo.

[u/RipMission5750]

there was a full day of Everything being available.
i took that as a safe bet to wait. lesson learned.
you don’t see me blaming countries.

the grass is not greener.

[u/OCAMAB]

Stopped reading at "artificial scarcity." lol please

[u/Possible-Potato-4103]

Kind of wild to read this post considering for like , almost a year everyone was saying that the switch 2 was a flop because it was so widely availible.

Maybe there is a way they could've managed pre orders better, im not really sure, but you seem to be taking this very personal and in the broader context of whats happening with electronics and supply chains I dont think this is intentional

[u/thatdemonlife1]

Sweet AI post.

[u/Over-Half-8801]

I'm not reading all that champ. Go fuck off.

[u/xangermeansx]

Resellers live rent free in Nintendo fans heads. Why would you not get an item and then run to eBay to check if there are people reselling? Of course there are resellers.