This Week in Bad Pop Culture Ideas: Console launch scarcity

It seems like every single time that a new gaming console comes out, managing to find it within a reasonable amount of time requires little more than luck.

Last weekend had a lot to offer for fans of pop culture. If you’re a movie and comic book buff, you had Logan to occupy at least a couple hours of your time, and more if you bought multiple tickets. If you’re a gaming enthusiast, you probably turned your attention to the launch of the Nintendo Switch. Should you be both, we assume that the daylight saving time change this weekend ruined your chances of catching up on any sleep. Good luck, and we hope you get your sleep soon.

But now, out wandering through nearby stores a week after launch, I found that the shelves in the Nintendo sections are devoid of consoles. I’m not sure why I should be surprised. The great NES Classic hunt continues for many of us, yours truly included. (At this point, I only believe they exist because I’ve seen photos. Nintendo, just let me indulge my nostalgia.)

And yet, it appears that this scarcity this has once again paid off for Nintendo. Quoting analyst Lewis Ward, CNBC suspects that 2 million units worldwide will ship by the end of this month. By now, you’ve also probably seen this tweet from New York Times reporter Nick Wingfield, speaking to Reggie Fils-Aimé:

Those kinds of sales will likely tell Nintendo that they can draw their fans out to midnight launch after midnight launch and sell consoles. The loyalty is strong, speaking as someone who only avoided going to a midnight Switch launch because yours truly stayed up until midnight two months before for a pre-order that shipped directly to me. In other words, there was a midnight launch involved, just not on March 3 like everyone else.

Does that guarantee success? Well, no, and IGN has an explanation of why. To make a long story short, the Wii U did some nice sales in its initial window as well. A few months later, things, well, changed.

Here’s why it works, though. Having systems tough to find tells people that the thing is popular, which means that they’ll want the popular thing, right? Odds are that they don’t have a Wii U anyway because the Wii U has sold less than 14 million consoles worldwide. Therefore, if they want to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, they need a Switch.

“It prints money!” is an old meme. It’s hard to escape the feeling that Nintendo has become very aware of its money-printing powers.

However, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good idea. The whole concept of having systems being hard to find only lasts so long in terms of goodwill. This isn’t exactly like trying to get into the movie theater to see Logan or Rogue One or any of the other big movies of the past few months. Switch stock doesn’t magically refresh every two hours or so.

This isn’t to say that Nintendo isn’t the only company that does this, either. There’s never going to be enough to go around. Finding a PlayStation 4 wasn’t that much easier during the first few months it was on sale, as noted and even explained by Sony itself. However, we now sit with 53.4 million systems sold as of January 2017.

Next: Breath of the Wild review: The most complete Zelda

How long will it take for gamers’ loyalty to wear out? Well, that remains to be seen. After all, isn’t trying to get the latest console at launch just a real life quest, and completing it first the ultimate reward?