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Most companies, having unexpectedly stumbled into an extremely popular product, would prepare for product, hire more people, increase supply, and ride the revenue train for as long as they could. Nintendo is not most companies. Co-ordinate to Reggie Fils-Aimé, the visitor killed the NES Classic Edition after selling two.three 1000000 units, because information technology had a lot of other stuff to practise.

"We had originally planned for this to be a product for last vacation," Fils-Aimé told Time. "We only didn't anticipate how incredible the response would exist. Once nosotros saw that response, we added shipments and extended the production for equally long as we could to meet more than of that consumer demand."

This is an cool justification. Nintendo isn't a fly-by-night startup struggling with its production chain or a greenbacks-strapped newcomer in a crowded marketplace. Despite the Wii U'south complete failure and the 3DS' waning sales, the visitor reported $2.four billion in profits through 2022. Nintendo has longstanding relationships with manufacturers and there's no conceivable way that the company simply ran out of manufacturing funds — which makes Fils-Aimé'south follow-upwards comments all the more ridiculous. Having sold 2.three one thousand thousand consoles in simply under six months (a sales rate which absolutely dwarfs the Wii U'southward throughout 2022), Nintendo decided it had sold enough hardware.

"Fifty-fifty with that extraordinary level of functioning, we understand that people are frustrated about not being able to find the system, and for that nosotros really do apologize," Fils-Aimé said. "But from our perspective, it's important to recognize where our future is and the central areas that we demand to drive. We've got a lot going on right now and we don't accept unlimited resources."

NES-Classic-Statement

There's no mention of "unlimited resources," only there's certainly a mention of using the NES Classic Edition to drive Switch sales

Back in January, Nintendo was apologizing to consumers for the inconvenience caused by shortages, without a peep concerning hereafter cancellations. I believe Fils-Aimé when he says that the product was more popular than Nintendo realized it would exist, and that the firm had initially intended a limited-run holiday release. What I don't believe is that the visitor's decision to cancel its NES Classic has anything to do with insufficient resource allotment. Nintendo is sitting on plenty of greenbacks and turned a respectable turn a profit even with anemic living room console sales in 2022. The NES Classic Edition was moving more units than the Wii U on a monthly ground and any company actually interested in maximizing revenue would have expanded product.

The consumer-hostile decision to kill the NES Classic Edition could accept been driven by a desire to bring NES games to the Switch. Nintendo has fabricated a package of money selling the same titles on various iterations of its consoles. Information technology might have been killed because Nintendo wants to effect an SNES Classic this holiday season, and doesn't want the NES Classic cutting into that market. (In theory, Nintendo could offer both consoles on the aforementioned silicon.) Alternately, Nintendo may accept killed the Classic considering information technology didn't want the platform cutting into Switch sales. After all, Nintendo wants you to buy its latest platform to keep you engaged — there aren't new NES games coming out and selling you lot a Archetype doesn't keep you plugged into the Nintendo ecosystem.

But regardless of the specific reason, the net upshot is that would-be customers who spent months attempting to buy an NES Classic for something less than the hundreds of dollars they were selling for on eBay got shafted. That's reason enough to avoid these nostalgia bombs in the futurity.