After the stock shortages that have surrounded the Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition and Nintendo Switch, Nintendo is once again facing accusations that they have tried to create artificial scarcity around their portable home console.
That claim has now been firmly denied by Charlie Scibetta, Nintendo of America’s senior director of corporate communications, who pointed out that they would clearly prefer to have consoles available at retail to support their key monthly releases – like ARMS, Splatoon 2, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle and Super Mario Odyssey.
“It’s definitely not intentional in terms of shorting the market,” Scibetta explained to Ars Technica.
“We’re making it as fast as we can. We want to get as many units out as we can to support all the software that’s coming out right now… our job really is to get it out as quick as we can, especially for this holiday because we want to have units on shelves to support Super Mario Odyssey.
“We anticipated there was going to be demand for it, but the demand has been even higher than we thought,” he added. “We had a good quantity for launch, we sold 2.7 million worldwide in that first month, said we’re going to have 10 million [more] by the end of the fiscal year.
“Unfortunately, we’re in a situation right now where as quick as it’s going into retail outlets it’s being snapped up. It’s a good problem to have, but we’re working very hard to try and meet demand.”
