Nintendo fans currently have far better odds of coronavirus pandemic as a business opportunity.
It's a shame, as the Nintendo Switch has an most recent Nintendo Switch shortage is a unique challenge to the company. Reaching and potentially even looking to sur the lifetime sales of the developer's best-selling Wii, a combination of genuine consumer demand, acute supply snags, and the behavior of a malicious few looking to capitalize on a public health disaster have ed to devastate the Nintendo Switch's global stock.
In a report by Vice's Motherboard, a dive into the reseller underworld has identified a damaging culprit in the current Nintendo Switch shortage. Tech scalpers - especially Nintendo product scalpers - have used automated programs to wreak unbridled havoc on the Amiibo market in the past, causing official stock to sell out instantly and allowing for unfair resale at the price of their choosing. One such bot, called Bird Bot, is supposedly a major player in the current console shortage, and "hundreds of people" were found discussing how to best use the program to bleed Nintendo's stock dry. Of course, they're looking out for themselves individually rather than plotting as an organized collective, with some of them even being regular customers just "desperate to get their hands on a Switch," but the end result is effectively the same - Switches for me, not for thee.
Trying to get a lid on the situation, Nintendo recently reassured customers that Switches would soon be back on the shelves at their rightful retail price. Increased production would certainly be better than the current situation, but it begs the question of by how much. With Bird Bot and, presumably, other scalping programs becoming more mainstream than ever before, what's to stop those bad actors and players pushed into the very behavior that hurt them in the first place from grabbing up critical restocks and repeating the cycle? Ideally, one would assume existing regulations are the answer. However, scalping is illegal to varying degrees in only 15 states in the US, and prosecuting an untold number of video game console resellers during a fast-evolving national emergency would not likely be a high priority right now.
As the next console generation inexorably approaches and the Nintendo Switch's hardware is pushed to its limit by ambitious developers, this is probably the best time to own one. (The aforementioned quarantine utility also still applies.) Unfortunately, Nintendo may not be able to outpace the illicitly deepening pockets of some of its most reliable consumers for some time. The Nintendo Switch isn't in a bad place in of console sales by any reasonable measure, but there could be trouble in Kyoto if headway isn't made by the 2020 holiday season.
Source: Vice Motherboard
