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  2. Is Nintendo Doing Right by Their Fans?

Is Nintendo Doing Right by Their Fans?

Sep 12, 2017

Nintendo has been doing everything right for their fans since the announcement and release of the Nintendo Switch console. They left the Wii U behind and have a renewed focus on their core fan base. This was true in all areas of Nintendo except for one, these "Classics" systems.

When the NES Classic was announced, journalists and fans thought surely this would be everywhere. We thought we'd be able to just walk into like a Kohl's and pick one up at the checkout line. We were far from wrong. Nintendo didn't produce nearly enough units to meet demand. This led to a scalpers' field day as well as extremely frustrated Nintendo core fans and casual gamers alike. Nintendo claimed this console was targeted for people who didn't own their core consoles and therefore couldn't play these titles through the Virtual Console service. They did the typical Nintendo move, staying very conservative. After a ridiculous amount of fan backlash, Nintendo announced to increase the quantity of and duration of the production to try to meet demand. This still wasn't enough; the NES Classic was "discontinued". At least that's what we called it. I speculate Nintendo had every intention to stop production at a certain date. With millions of frustrated people who refuse to pay over $200 on auction/resell sites, this set the precedent for the next announcement; the SNES Classic.

When this was announced, nobody expects to be able to find one. There were no pre-orders offered for the NES Classic, but there were going to be pre-orders for the SNES Classic. The hype and angst was driven so high, the pre-orders were a giant cluster bomb. The retailers’ placeholder sites were targeted by bots that would automatically purchase the console before any person could even see the "add to cart" button. This led to pre-orders being sold out in seconds, that's right, seconds. Again, there was a crazy back lash of frustration all over every social media outlet against Nintendo. Everybody was essentially yelling at Nintendo, "Why not more?!"

Given the "new" (post Wii U) Nintendo, I always held out hope that Nintendo would circle back around and produce more. After all, they are a company with interest in making money. They weren't going to continue letting scalpers take all the cash, would they? They've seemed to respond to all the feedback over the last 5 years, why not with this?

Sure enough! Kotaku posted this article

https://kotaku.com/nintendo-bringing-back-the-nes-classic-in-2018-1803771394

Two things Nintendo did! One, they are extending the production of the SNES Classic into 2018! Two, they are indeed bringing back the NES Classic into production in the Summer of 2018!

Thank you Nintendo! This is such a good move for the fans by Nintendo. They didn't need to do this, they made their money on the first run. Even if this makes some of us feel silly about what we had to do to procure the NES Classic and the SNES Classic pre-order.

What do you guys think of all this? Hit me up in the comments!