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SNES Classic Preorder Shitshow Discussion (Please Read Rules in OP)

And yet Reggie and the rest of the fucking morons who run NOA continue to be loved simply because Reggie occasionally makes a joke on a livestream.

Way to make piracy 1000x easier than actually buying a fucking SNES rom in a legitmate manner.

No virtual console, no availability on SNES classics. :(

What really gets me too on this is I love Yoshi's Island...a game they refuse to release on VC on their other systems. Yet there it is in this...and lets not even start on Star Fox 2. It's asinine.
 
If you guys are willing to pay for this as part of a bundle, then you'll have another chance to pre order at 8 am central from a different site. I'll give you a quick heads up right before it drops.

Target or Walmart perhaps. Target opens at 8am but I figured it would coincide with pacific time. It didnt. Ill watch for your post at 8am central.
 

zigg

Member
There has to be a better way to handle this shit
Yeah, there is, but nobody wants to do it.

It's really simple. Between the time you announce a product and the time you release it, you allow every single person who has an account with your online store to put their name on a list, once.

When you actually know your shipment size, you randomly select X people from that list and email them to let them know they have 24 hours to commit to an order.

Whoever doesn't commit can go back into the pool, and you repeat until your shipment is sold out. If there's still more demand than supply, keep the pool and allow people to add themselves to it if they wish.

Pros:


  1. Completely fair to people who actually sleep at night
  2. Much harder to game (unless they're willing to sign up for 100 accounts, scalpers are not going to get 100 chances)
  3. Doesn't require a retailer to invest in huge scale-up tests
Cons: (I guess?)


  1. Solution has to be developed (but consider you're already spending a bunch on reliability engineering and scaling up just to handle the spikes)
  2. People who get the item from another retailer can still buy it from you and sell it on the secondary market
  3. No news stories about how nobody can buy the blasted thing
I mean, am I missing anything?

I don't claim any rights to this, by the way. If any retailer wants to implement this, be my guest. Maybe send me a Super NES if you like the idea? Because I didn't get one last night because I was sleeping.
 

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
What I find even worse is that Amazon allowed people to preorder more than 1 at a time.

You could have gone on and ordered 10.


Figure they would have corrected that considering what happened with the NES.

I find this infuriating.
 

entremet

Member
Nintendo is so damn wacky. This company, man.

Has there been any other company that misjudges demand so commonly?

I mean, 1am?! Seriously?!
 
Shhh, it's all part of the conspiracy.

On ebay pre-orders are being sold for $220+ rn

With the NES Classic, I was fortunate because I was there 15 minutes early in front of GameStop on Day 1, before every scalper and their mother figured out it was going to be the hot ticket Christmas item that holiday. There was no line of people at all. But within hours, the word got out on social media that this thing was going to be impossible to get and it basically never became widely available again. I probably won't be so lucky with the SNES Classic and will likely have to end up paying scalper prices.
 
People WTFing that it went up at night, that's how it usually goes, same happened with Switch. You weren't hardcore enough like us who came armed and prepared. In the jungle the strongest survive.
 
What's most frustrating is that I had one from the Walmart debacle and now that's canceled and they're putting them up at 2 in the morning. As if that makes more sense.
 
So to recap, the SNES Classic is announced. The rest of the world gets a chance to pre-order immediately, while the rest of us in the States open up a half dozen different vendor sites and F5 them every 30 seconds for the better part of 48 hours. No word from Nintendo.

Several weeks pass with no new information, including whether US pre-orders will even be a thing. And then a stealth release on Wal-Mart occurs late one night. Several folks get in their pre-orders and all seems well. A few cancellations occur, but there's reasons to suspect these are related to billing issues. Five full days pass, and then Wal-Mart unceremoniously cancels everyone's order. Tough luck, fucko!

Another month passes. Pre-orders are promised to take place, but there's no word on when or how many units are available. Just some unspecified window of time "later." Later turns out to be in the early morning hours of a random Tuesday, where a good portion of the eastern US is still asleep, blissfully unaware that they're being fucked yet again.

Well then. When you lay it all out like that, it almost seems malicious.


reggie-fils-aime-shrug-640x426.jpg
 
Is there actual proof that putting preorders up in the middle of the night befits scalpers? Seems like theres enough regular people online willing to buy it who aren't scalpers even during the middle of the night. Alerting everyone about preorders doesn't always work out. With that if there isn't enough stock it comes down to dumb luck either way. There have been items where they sell out before the page even shows me they're in stock.
 

Cloud7

Member
I went from having a Walmart preorder to having it cancel and then to missing out on Amazon and Best Buy preorders because they were at weird hours. Amazing lol
 

The Llama

Member
Purchased off Amazon, and it just changed to tell me I had signed up for an instock alert...which i had previously done for the SNES Classic listing. I think it's legit and Amazon will be switching it over and fixing the listing soon.
 

Aaltopahvi

Neo Member
Why wont people just buy a raspberry? The SNES mini is 165€ here. You could build a complete rasp kit with a controller, case and all and you still had money over for three 24pcs cases of beer!
 

alr1ght

bish gets all the credit :)
Is there actual proof that putting preorders up in the middle of the night befits scalpers? Seems like theres enough regular people online willing to buy it who aren't scalpers even during the middle of the night.
Scalpers are less likely to have real jobs, hence being able to stay up at all hours of the night.
 

Warnen

Don't pass gaas, it is your Destiny!
My brother wakes up at 3am est for work and I get a string of text by 4am telling me I better order off amazon now. Thought someone died! I thank his early bird schedule!
 

zigg

Member
Why wont people just buy a raspberry? The SNES mini is 165€ here. You could build a complete rasp kit with a controller, case and all and you still had money over for three 24pcs cases of beer!
As a package, they're not nearly as attractive.

Aren't they laggy as hell, too? That's what I've heard, at least.
 

Koppai

Member
Well I am pissed, first I missed the Best Buy one, and now the Amazon? Why the fuck can't this be like any other game console, preorder it and they make enough to cover those?
 
So to recap, the SNES Classic is announced. The rest of the world gets a chance to pre-order immediately, while the rest of us in the States open up a half dozen different vendor sites and F5 them every 30 seconds for the better part of 48 hours. No word from Nintendo.

Several weeks pass with no new information, including whether US pre-orders will even be a thing. And then a stealth release on Wal-Mart occurs late one night. Several folks get in their pre-orders and all seems well. A few cancellations occur, but there's reasons to suspect these are related to billing issues. Five full days pass, and then Wal-Mart unceremoniously cancels everyone's order. Tough luck, fucko!

Another month passes. Pre-orders are promised to take place, but there's no word on when or how many units are available. Just some unspecified window of time "later." Later turns out to be in the early morning hours of a random Tuesday, where a good portion of the eastern US is still asleep, blissfully unaware that they're being fucked yet again.

Well then. When you lay it all out like that, it almost seems malicious.

Well, Nintendo also projected coordinates on to a hot air balloon in Tulsa leading to an air gap Dell Inspiron with instructions to preorder at that last remaining Circuit City in Dallas.

They gave everyone the same opportunity.
 

Einhandr

Member
Purchased off Amazon, and it just changed to tell me I had signed up for an instock alert...which i had previously done for the SNES Classic listing. I think it's legit and Amazon will be switching it over and fixing the listing soon.

Also see product description bullet points which I don't think were there when the listing first went up.
 

zigg

Member
Best Buy is just playing with me now. The Pre-Order button just lit up but it says the item is unavailable for online purchase when I click it.
 

mindatlarge

Member
Yeah, there is, but nobody wants to do it.

It's really simple. Between the time you announce a product and the time you release it, you allow every single person who has an account with your online store to put their name on a list, once.

When you actually know your shipment size, you randomly select X people from that list and email them to let them know they have 24 hours to commit to an order.

Whoever doesn't commit can go back into the pool, and you repeat until your shipment is sold out. If there's still more demand than supply, keep the pool and allow people to add themselves to it if they wish.

Pros:


  1. Completely fair to people who actually sleep at night
  2. Much harder to game (unless they're willing to sign up for 100 accounts, scalpers are not going to get 100 chances)
  3. Doesn't require a retailer to invest in huge scale-up tests
Cons: (I guess?)


  1. Solution has to be developed (but consider you're already spending a bunch on reliability engineering and scaling up just to handle the spikes)
  2. People who get the item from another retailer can still buy it from you and sell it on the secondary market
  3. No news stories about how nobody can buy the goddamned thing
I mean, am I missing anything?

I don't claim any rights to this, by the way. If any retailer wants to implement this, be my guest. Maybe send me a Super NES if you like the idea? Because I didn't fucking get one last night because I was fucking sleeping.
I've read ideas like this before and I do love the thought. Though I think Nintendo prefers the media attention that a hot item gets when it's hard to get over potential sales for the actual product. It's like a sacrificial lamb to them.
 

Syriel

Member
Why wont people just buy a raspberry? The SNES mini is 165€ here. You could build a complete rasp kit with a controller, case and all and you still had money over for three 24pcs cases of beer!

That's only cheaper when you don't figure in the cost of buying the carts and dumping them.

Hardware without games is no fun.
 
Best Buy is just playing with me now. The Pre-Order button just lit up but it says the item is unavailable for online purchase when I click it.
had one in my card, and I got all the way to the last step before it booted me and removed from my cart... sigh
 

Spacebar

Member
If you guys get reports of them cancelling Amazon orders then keep a look out for them to re open. Amazon had no limit on quantity. Best Buy seems to have had a 2 limit per account.
 

Aaltopahvi

Neo Member
As a package, they're not nearly as attractive.

Aren't they laggy as hell, too? That's what I've heard, at least.

Well they don't quite look like a Snes for sure. But the cases you can buy can be really attractive. It's a DIY project so of course results depend on skill. And for SNES emulation my Rasp has been perfect. There is no lag, frame drops or latency in picture or control so no idea what that is about.
 

Bluth54

Member
And yet Reggie and the rest of the fucking morons who run NOA continue to be loved simply because Reggie occasionally makes a joke on a livestream.

Way to make piracy 1000x easier than actually buying a fucking SNES rom in a legitmate manner.

No virtual console, no availability on SNES classics. :(

Yep. NES mini should still be available on store shelves, SNES mini shouldn't be limited either.

Since PC is the primary platform where piracy of their old games happens the should be selling their old games on PC, probably on Steam because you know any sort of PC platform they come up with would almost certainly be awful.
 
Why wont people just buy a raspberry? The SNES mini is 165€ here. You could build a complete rasp kit with a controller, case and all and you still had money over for three 24pcs cases of beer!

Because the vast majority of people who are interested in the SNES classic don't even physically own half the games it comes with so they can dump them. If you're trying to talk about getting the roms through other means, I wouldn't do that here.
 

mindatlarge

Member
Best Buy is just playing with me now. The Pre-Order button just lit up but it says the item is unavailable for online purchase when I click it.
It was doing that most of the night last night once the pre-orders initially sold out. I don't think anyone was able to secure one since the listing had been in that state. Though who knows now...
 

alr1ght

bish gets all the credit :)
Since PC is the primary platform where piracy of their old games happens the should be selling their old games on PC, probably on Steam because you know any sort of PC platform they come up with would almost certainly be awful.
I would almost like to see just how horrible Nintendo's PC client would be. 😁
 
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