Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in less than a minute

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 254 posts

Re: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in less than a minute

#111

Post by rubyfan »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #3

Clearly thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of gamers were sitting on the product page hammering the F5 key and some random selection thereof got their wish. I highly doubt that. My guess is that third party resellers used bots to purchase them all. Why wouldn't tc come to the same conclusion? Edit. yep here's one on eBay for $500+: http://m.ebay.com/itm/New-Nintendo-NES-Classic-Edition-Conso...

There are over 2000 negative reviews on the Amazon page from people complaining that they were there at 5 and go nothing but errors (myself included).

Re: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in less than a minute

#112

Post by dgemm »

a_bonobo wrote: post #106
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #3

Clearly thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of gamers were sitting on the product page hammering the F5 key and some random selection thereof got their wish. I highly doubt that. My guess is that third party resellers used bots to purchase them all. Why wouldn't tc come to the same conclusion? Edit. yep here's one on eBay for $500+: http://m.ebay.com/itm/New-Nintendo-NES-Classic-Edition-Conso...

In Australia, the NES Classic Edition came out on Thursday - the physical copies at Target etc. too were sold out in minutes, too. Some of the Facebook comments said that their local shop only got a few boxes which were gone mmediately: https://www.facebook.com/NintendoAUNZ/videos/714922218664914... As usual, Nintendo doesn't get their customers and is completely unprepared.

I think they know exactly what they're doing. Selling out in minutes causes news stories, and here we are.

Re: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in less than a minute

#113

Post by d23 »

mrfusion wrote: post #70

It seems silly to me to allocate a product by the vageries of refresh rates and server responsiveness. It seems like Amazon could come up with many other ideas for allocating a limited product. There's no rule that says it has to be based on the millisecond ordered. For example how about a game of chance (or skill?) to let people compete for the product? It would feel a lot more fulfilling than an error page. And it…

Eh, or what about loyalty to amazon? If they had honestly messaged me and said that because of the age of my account and amount I had spent that I would get to be part of the first group in line to purchase, I might have even bought one just for that reason. Not that they needed more people buying them, but my loyalty to them would probably only go up.

Re: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in less than a minute

#114

Post by hartator »

rubyfan wrote: post #111
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #3

Clearly thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of gamers were sitting on the product page hammering the F5 key and some random selection thereof got their wish. I highly doubt that. My guess is that third party resellers used bots to purchase them all. Why wouldn't tc come to the same conclusion? Edit. yep here's one on eBay for $500+: http://m.ebay.com/itm/New-Nintendo-NES-Classic-Edition-Conso...

There are over 2000 negative reviews on the Amazon page from people complaining that they were there at 5 and go nothing but errors (myself included).

Amazon own website can't run properly on AWS?

Re: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in less than a minute

#115

Post by seansmccullough »

hartator wrote: post #114
rubyfan wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are over 2000 negative reviews on the Amazon page from people complaining that they were there at 5 and go nothing but errors (myself included).

Amazon own website can't run properly on AWS?

Parts of it don't run on AWS.

Re: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in less than a minute

#116

Post by jimmies »

eridius wrote: post #22
childifchaos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this "morally bankrupt"? It's just smart. Every business on earth would do this in there sector if they had the chance. What's wrong with a smart and clever individual buying this to resell at 8x? It's not hurting anyone, it's just a stupid retro console. What's wrong with society? People are struggling and getting screwed over by governments and big business, they badly need income and here is a small opportu…

> It's not hurting anyone, it's just a stupid retro console. It's hurting the people who are forced to pay $600 for a $60 item because they need one (e.g. a must-have gift for someone). It's hurting the people who wanted to buy one for $60 but cannot afford to buy one for $600. So yeah, it's hurting basically everybody who had any interest in buying the product.

Oh no, I'm so sorry to hear that you're hurt! Where does it hurt with regard to your feelings?

In the mean time, you can remedy the hurt with an SD card, and a Raspberry Pi Zero that you could buy at the nearest MicroCenter for the price of 0.99 and half an hour of loading RetroPie on it.

Re: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in less than a minute

#117

Post by csulmone »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #3

Clearly thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of gamers were sitting on the product page hammering the F5 key and some random selection thereof got their wish. I highly doubt that. My guess is that third party resellers used bots to purchase them all. Why wouldn't tc come to the same conclusion? Edit. yep here's one on eBay for $500+: http://m.ebay.com/itm/New-Nintendo-NES-Classic-Edition-Conso...

I managed to pick one up on the Amazon mobile app. I had to do it exactly at the right time, but there wasn't an issue other than page load slowdown.

Re: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in less than a minute

#118

Post by cjdulberger »

a_bonobo wrote: post #106
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #3

Clearly thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of gamers were sitting on the product page hammering the F5 key and some random selection thereof got their wish. I highly doubt that. My guess is that third party resellers used bots to purchase them all. Why wouldn't tc come to the same conclusion? Edit. yep here's one on eBay for $500+: http://m.ebay.com/itm/New-Nintendo-NES-Classic-Edition-Conso...

In Australia, the NES Classic Edition came out on Thursday - the physical copies at Target etc. too were sold out in minutes, too. Some of the Facebook comments said that their local shop only got a few boxes which were gone mmediately: https://www.facebook.com/NintendoAUNZ/videos/714922218664914... As usual, Nintendo doesn't get their customers and is completely unprepared.

Reminds me of the initial release of the Wii. Seems like a strategy to create scarcity and increase demand.

Re: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in less than a minute

#119

Post by mikiem »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #3

Clearly thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of gamers were sitting on the product page hammering the F5 key and some random selection thereof got their wish. I highly doubt that. My guess is that third party resellers used bots to purchase them all. Why wouldn't tc come to the same conclusion? Edit. yep here's one on eBay for $500+: http://m.ebay.com/itm/New-Nintendo-NES-Classic-Edition-Conso...

I can confirm that this is a thing... a bigger thing than one might think. I run an IaaS cloud provider and I know off the top of my head several customers of ours who each maintain a fleet of VMs to do this for a variety of products. Eg: Limited edition shoes, show tickets, etc. Some of our customers who do this keep the VMs running and some fire them up only when needed. Some use custom software and scripts and some use purchased software designed specifically for the sites and products they want to beat others to.

Re: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in less than a minute

#120

Post by SN76477 »

cjdulberger wrote: post #118
a_bonobo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Australia, the NES Classic Edition came out on Thursday - the physical copies at Target etc. too were sold out in minutes, too. Some of the Facebook comments said that their local shop only got a few boxes which were gone mmediately: https://www.facebook.com/NintendoAUNZ/videos/714922218664914... As usual, Nintendo doesn't get their customers and is completely unprepared.

Reminds me of the initial release of the Wii. Seems like a strategy to create scarcity and increase demand.

Possible, but Nintendo do not seem like the sort of company that needs to use direct marketing tactics to sell their products.
Post reply on HN