So here we are, last day of 2016, and I still don't have an NES Classic under the tree. I want to be mad about this but honestly at this point it's become more of a hobby than a shopping errand.
Quick recap for anyone who's been offline since November: Nintendo put out this tiny reissue of the original NES, the "NES Classic Edition," loaded with 30 games, for $59.99. It came out November 11th. It has been essentially unbuyable at retail price every single day since. Not "hard to find" in the normal holiday-shopping sense where you check three stores and grumble. I mean actually, structurally unavailable: Amazon, Best Buy, Target, Walmart, GameStop, all of them selling out within minutes of any restock, if there even is a public restock and not just some vague "check back later" message.
I've had alerts set up on three different sites since the first week of December. Twitter bots that ping you the second a store shows inventory. I caught two "in stock" windows. Both times the thing was gone before the page even finished loading the checkout form. My nephew is getting a gift card this year and honestly he's twelve, he'll survive.
Meanwhile eBay is an absolute circus. I spent a chunk of an evening this week just scrolling listings out of morbid curiosity, and the going rate right now is somewhere between $150 and $300 depending on whether the seller bundles in an extra controller. For a device that retails for sixty bucks. That's not a markup, that's a different product category entirely. Some of these sellers clearly have bots or some kind of standing relationship with retail employees, because nobody is manually refreshing a Best Buy page fast enough to snag six units in one go, over and over, week after week.
I don't really blame the individual scalpers, not most of them anyway — if a market exists that dumb, someone's going to arbitrage it, that's just how people are. What bugs me is Nintendo's messaging on this. They keep saying "more units are coming" without ever saying how many, or when, or whether it'll be enough to actually move the needle. It's the same trick companies pulled with the Wii a decade ago, and it worked then too, so I get why nobody wants to fix it. Scarcity is free marketing. Every article about "you can't find the NES Classic" is also, structurally, an ad for the NES Classic.
Between this and the price of Super Mario Run's $9.99 unlock (which, side note, still needs a constant internet connection to play even the parts you already paid for, which is a weird design choice I have complaints about but that's a different post), it's been a strange month to be a Nintendo fan who also just wants to buy things at the price printed on the box.
Anyway. If you actually managed to get one of these at retail, congratulations, you're either very lucky or you work somewhere that gets pallets of these things at 6am. For the rest of us, the current plan seems to be: wait for 2017 restocks, don't pay scalper prices no matter how tempting it gets around hour three of refreshing a product page, and maybe just emulate the thing if you're desperate enough (I'm not saying do that, I'm saying I understand why people do that).
One more thing before I close the laptop on this year. It's been a rough back half of December for reasons that have nothing to do with gadgets — losing Carrie Fisher and then Debbie Reynolds within a day of each other hit harder than I expected for someone I never met. Feels like a strange note to end 2016 on, on top of everything else this year threw at us. Not going to pretend I have anything smart to say about it, just wanted to mark it down here since that's kind of what this blog is for, keeping a record of what a given week actually felt like and not just what shipped that week.
See you all in 2017. Hopefully with an actual NES Classic to show for it.