Nintendo Senior Director of Corporate Communications Charlie Scibetta recently talked about the shortage of Nintendo Switch consoles to Ars Technica. There, he talked more about the situation, explaining that it wasn’t intentional. According to Scibetta, they were prepared for some demand, but the demand ended up being even higher than they expected. Scibetta says they’re trying very hard to meet the demand.
Scibetta also brought up the NES Mini, admitting that “I think we could have done a better job communicating that was gonna be a limited run. It was supposed to be for that holiday. We extended it actually because demand was so much, then we stopped producing it”. Here’s all that Scibetta had to say on the Switch shortages:
“It’s definitely not intentional in terms of shorting the market. We’re making it as fast as we can. We want to get as many units out as we can to support all the software that’s coming out right now… our job really is to get it out as quick as we can, especially for this holiday because we want to have units on shelves to support Super Mario Odyssey.
We anticipated there was going to be demand for it, but the demand has been even higher than we thought. We had a good quantity for launch, we sold 2.7 million worldwide in that first month, said we’re going to have 10 million [more] by the end of the fiscal year… Unfortunately, we’re in a situation right now where as quick as it’s going into retail outlets it’s being snapped up. It’s a good problem to have, but we’re working very hard to try to meet demand.”
P1. Lol I don’t believe that Nintendo is engineering shortages, but I don’t know if people should believe them just because they say that. It’s sort of like…
https://media.makeameme.org/created/trust-me-ckfnwm.jpg
Don’t believe it because Nintendo says it, believe it because it would be a spectacularly stupid business strategy. In video games, the money is in licensing software for your platform. You do that by having a large customer base. Every game company wants as many people as humanly possible to have their machine at any given time to draw more software to the platform. This is why many consoles are sold at a loss, especially at launch.
If Reggie said it, then it’s total bullshit. Otherwise, I believe it was just ignorance, shortsightedness, poor planning… typical to how Nintendo manages everything. They plan everything like they cater to their friends and family. Hello. You live on planet Earth. We would all like what you’re having also if it’s not too much trouble to make more than three of everything.
What do you have to lose… Haha! ^^
Nintendo: The Switch shortage is not intentional. We are even working on a mystical method of save data backup. We care about the time and effort our consumers put into their games.
Donald Trump: I care passionately about this country and the intrest of the people. I respect all races and nationalities. Although I’m inexperienced, I believe in showing both tact and humility, as well as learning from pubic criticism.
Pokemon Company, International: We truly want Ash to grow as a character and not only win a Pokemon League conference, but go well beyond that and steadily achieve his goal of becoming Pokemon Master.
Ken Penders: I care about the original continuity of the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comic, and respect how Ian Flynn is handling the series. I not only acknowledge that I was wrong for trying to make a quick profit off an intellectual property whose source I have little to no knowledge of or interest in, but I was wrong to cause so much legal hell for everyone, as well as irking so many long time fans and collectors of the comic.
4Kids: In the post-era of our bankrupcy, we have learned that it was wrong for us to alter so many of our past anime beyond the point of recognition. If we ever get another chance, we will not only respect the source material of each anime, but release uncut English dub DVDs of each series we license.
I’m skeptical of this but whatever. *shrugs* I’m mostly pissed about the shitty stock of amiibo that I really want right now. I wonder what Nintendo’s excuse will be for those stock shortages.
Really? You’re not making shortages to put artificial excitement in some people? If you say so.
This is their biggest launch directly following one of their worst-selling consoles, so it doesn’t seem that far-fetched that they were caught off-guard. Besides, I’m starting to see these things in store on a more regular basis now, so I think the new stock is starting to circulate.
Too mlate, it should have preceeded Arms.
Eh… I’ve got my Switch sooooooo…
APPLE.. Stop blaming Nintendo. It’s Apple!
No it’s not.
I don’t know if they should believe them.
They can say it as many times as they want/ Idiots will still say they are doing it because “MAH ARTIFICIAL SHORTAGES.”
Even if the shortages WERE intentional, they would never admit to it. It would make them look bad.
I see no reason why Nintendo will engineer the shortages at this point… It made sense to do that for the Wii U cos nobody wanted to buy… But there is actual demand for the switch and a shortage of systems will hurt the sales of their games, and further restrict 3rd party support.
It makes absolutely no sense to me.
Love how the quotation marks in the title make it seem like the statement is sarcastic
It would be an incredibly stupid business move to purposefully have shortages when the demand for your product is high. People who actually convince themselves Nintendo is doing it on purpose are simply.. unintelligent (sorry, can’t think of a more fitting word. Maybe ignorant?).
I’m sure I’m the only one who remembers Kimishima saying that they intentionally weren’t going to go too big on numbers for launch because they weren’t sure how well it would do. That makes sense. I can totally believe the demand caught them off guard, especially following the Wii U’s failure in the market. And you can only produce units so fast. It’s like people think all you do is wave a magic wand and suddenly there are 20 million Switches ready to ship. I guess I’m also the only one who remembers it took Sony around 6-8 months until they were able to meet the demand for the PS4, as the demand caught them off guard as well. It can take a while to get the production up to speed when the demand is so high. Especially when encountering problems, like component shortages. Hopefully its fixed soon.
Finally a reasonable voice. I’m getting tired of all the ignorant (definitely the better word choice) voices that believe Nintendo would rather not make money and instead would purposefully limit themselves in not only hardware sales but software as well.
It’s not unintelligent or ignorant to expect Nintendo to do something they have very well done in the past. If anything, I say limiting the number of Switch consoles to 2m at launch was intentionally sending out small stock. Only this time they actually told us they were doing it. Even if they aren’t doing it now, it doesn’t change that they have done it in the past. *shrug* W/e, though. I got my Switch so I don’t care about this topic of intentionally limited Switch stock as much anymore. Sucks for those that want one & can’t get one, though. Anyway, back to waiting on restock (most likely intentionally limited again) of certain amiibo that could possibly never come.
The problem is that the Wii U was such a failure on the market, that it wouldn’t have made sense to bank on the Switch to succeed when it’s impossible to accurately gauge interest of those who intend on purchasing one. You say they met demand well in the past, but that’s really not true. The Wii had stocking issues for an extremely long time. Because the demand was simply too high to possibly meet. And they are clearly trying to meet demand here with the Switch, and there’s been many signs of that. So to ignore that, then yes, I’d say that’s ignorant or unintelligent. Wouldn’t make sense as a business to limit stock on an item that has high demand. This isn’t the first time this has happened with a product, and the Wii and PS4 serve as good examples. As for amiibo go, I have little opinion on that as I don’t follow as closely with amiibo as I used to. I will say that any time I’ve wanted an amiibo, I’ve simply preordered it. And I’ve never had a problem with that since mid-2015.
BULLSHIT !!!! we know they did exactly this with the Wii. For anyone in the UK wanting to get hold of one. Just go down to CEX, there are plenty
yo, pretty slick comment, my doug. Only one cromplaint, tho, you didn’t say bull “shite”, duh, you claim to be british?? Meh, I’ll see it when I believe it…
My above comment called it.
He’s right, though. Wii’s stock was intentionally limited it’s first month or two. Nintendo were probably a bit worried not going for power & HD quality would cause it to sell worse than Gamecube so they shipped out terribly low stock. And as they say, the rest was history as every non gamer & their grandma wanted a Wii, turning motion controls into a fad that lasted at least 4 years & caused Sony & Microsoft to quickly come up with their own motion controls. While sending out low stock is pretty shady, it actually does the trick & gets something to be more sought after than if it wasn’t low in stock. In fact, Nintendo themselves said they were gonna be sending out low stock for the Switch when they announced they’d only ship around 2m during launch. Are they intentionally limiting stock now? I honestly don’t care as I already got mine.
I read somewhere today that there are shortages due to the rapid production of the new iphones coming out this year
………. iPhones……. Apple can just wait, because I don’t see so much demand for an iPhone.
ADMIN… This is fake news. Please see section Dr Serkan Toto’s Tweet in regard to this article.