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

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

#221

Post by slim »

onion2k wrote: post #177
dgemm wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Doing things for press coverage in order to get an increase in future sales is a great idea for a startup with limited marketing funds, but Nintendo aren't exactly in that position. The fact is Nintendo failed to supply a sufficient amount of their product, and that has created a demand in a secondary market. All of the profit generated in that secondary market would have gone to Nintendo if they'd managed their supp…

Unless it's a campain aimed at destroying sales of it's competitors during Christmas season. Remember that announcement for a new console planned for March? That's a startup marketing thing too, right?

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

#222

Post by everfree »

nawtacawp wrote: post #214
Jotra7 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found the guy that has never tried emulation on a Pi.

Can you elaborate? Ive never used an emulator. I'm thinking NES games have a very low need for cpu / mem resources. Do they not run as good as the original?

I've tried an emulation box with RetroPie and the controller drivers are hard to find (at least for xbox 360 wired controller), the controls are difficult to set up (requiring manual edits to config files, which you need to plug a keyboard into your rpi to do), the controls are glitchy after you set them up, and the interface is not intuitive at all. If someone has a better idea for pi emulation I would really like to try it.

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

#223

Post by everfree »

yayitswei wrote: post #148

What's the (null) for in the headline? Nintendowned: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in (null) seconds

If I had to guess it's probably a non-programmer trying to be clever, even though (null) doesn't make any sense in the context.

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

#224

Post by ones_and_zeros »

maccard wrote: post #158
jakobegger wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that people are doing this with your VMs?

My question exactly. Will need to ensure I don't ever use OPs service

Ha don't jump to conclusions so quickly. We spend > $50k/mo on AWS and you better believe our solution architects deeply understand our product and architecture.

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

#225

Post by Lawtonfogle »

e40 wrote: post #6
typicalrunt wrote: post #2

I grok capitalism and even like it. But there are times where it is difficult to like it. In this case, people rushed to buy this product for the sole purpose of reselling it for 8x. What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense. In the end, I think these scalpers won't sell for 8x because anintendo will just pump out more product. Still, it is sad to see this happ…

What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense. This type of behavior is literally all around us. I recently listened to a podcast about this exact phenomenon. It featured a couple that had a special rug that drove cats crazy. They sold it on amazon for ~$35. A bunch of people bought them up and sold them on ebay for a lot more, using the drop-ship method (the resel…

The problem is finding which point was wrong. What behavior was done here that should be discouraged or banned by society? People don't like the outcome, but where should the government intervene?

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

#226

Post by efdee »

ben174 wrote: post #140
Waterluvian wrote: post #100

Honestly, I was going to buy one. But the itch will probably pass by the time they're back in stock. Since I'm filling that itch with emulators now. At an impulse buy price point, I wonder how many unrecoverable lost sales are caused by lack of supply.

Agreed. All the sell-out did was frustrate me a bit then set me on a mission to create the ultimate all-in-one raspberry pi image.

Mission accomplished? I would be interested ;-)

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

#227

Post by dom0 »

hrrsn wrote: post #190
Pietertje wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a flaw in the auction design. A simple rule as the closing time will be extended by x minutes after the last bid would solve this.

Our local auction site here in New Zealand, TradeMe, does that. Any bid in the last 2 minutes resets the clock to 2 minutes. Works pretty well for the seller, as prices tend to jump dramatically in these two minutes.

There is also at least one auction site with a similar business model that is practically a legal scam; bids cost money/points, and every bid increases the price by a fixed amount and extend the clock. Non-successful bids aren't paid back, of course.

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

#228

Post by savanaly »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #180
savanaly wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm truly sorry if my comment affected you negatively, it wasn't my intention. I used to be an econ tutor and sometimes my urge to just type my thoughts that way comes out and I regret that it sounds like lecturing. Anyways, why do you think that, given all that, scalping is a bad thing then? Isn't getting the goods to where they're valued most a good thing? Who's getting heartbroken here? The people who can't afford…

A problem I see is that the reseller is getting money for creating an artificial scarcity (buying off the stock of the original seller). It doesn't feel to me like an ethical behaviour. You portray it as making an unsolicited offering to the Gods of the Market on behalf of the original seller, but I don't think many people find a positive value in that. On the other hand, compare an example situations without scalpin…

Ok, put in that light I understand why there's a gut reaction of negativity. But when evaluating economic welfare of society, it is nearly an iron-clad rule to view all humans equally, and the scalpers are no exception. So we should try to push back against our gut reaction and look at it rationally.

Once we accept that the welfare of resellers matters just as much as customers, it's clear that the situation is not strictly worse with scalping.

As you helpfully tallied up there, the gains and losses of everyone involved is the same in terms of money changing hand in either case, but in the latter case of scalping, the world is richer, because in addition to the money you paid or lost, people in the world who have an NES celebrate it to the degree they like the NES. And that has to be higher for the people who won it via auction rather than blind luck.

I can see an objection coming, and that's that in the real world it's not blind luck, since often the people in a no scalping world camp out for days to try and be the winners of the lottery. But this is not a good outcome, because while this does mean that the people who value the NES most will tend to get it, it also leads to ruinous competition in terms of who is willing to spend the most time in line. The hours wasted to the line have to then be counted as a negative in the tally and that makes that option arguably worse than the blind lotto and certainly worse than the auction.

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

#229

Post by makomk »

pluma wrote: post #166
morgante wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is "morally bankrupt" about buying a mispriced good and reselling it at a proper price? People get very morally righteous about scalping, but I don't understand why at all. Resellers are correcting a distortion in the market and providing a value-added service.

The only value they add is amplifying the scarcity. How it normally works is this: * Some person sells something locally for $x * There is demand outside that location for the same product * Someone buys the product locally for $x and sells it elsewhere for $y > $x * Customers are provided access to a product they would otherwise not be aware of or not have access to, the reseller makes money from the margin, the pro…

I think it may even be possible to dump all the risk of the items not selling and storage costs onto the original seller due to quirks of how Amazon works.

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

#230

Post by jandrese »

savanaly wrote: post #123
typicalrunt wrote: post #2

I grok capitalism and even like it. But there are times where it is difficult to like it. In this case, people rushed to buy this product for the sole purpose of reselling it for 8x. What's wrong with our society that some people can be so morally bankrupt and bereft of good sense. In the end, I think these scalpers won't sell for 8x because anintendo will just pump out more product. Still, it is sad to see this happ…

I feel like if you truly groked capitalism, you would be able to point out lots of its flaws, but also to realize that scalping is definitely not one of them. With supply limited like this, the optimal social outcome is for the X units produced to go to the X people in the world who would value them most, in other words the people who would be willing to pay the most (only exception I can think of to this is if someo…

Scalping is definitely sub-optimal. The reason being that it rewards a middleman, not the person doing the effort. It discourages labor.

A proper capitalist system for an event like a concert would have everybody enter bids for the seats, and once the venue fills up (or on the date of the event) the seats are assigned based on the bids. Of course if you're poor and the event is popular then capitalism says you're SOL. Money is everything and without money you are nothing.

One nice thing about this system is that prices are set by the people, not by the venue. People pay exactly what they think the performance is worth and no more. Artists get direct feedback as to how popular their act is.

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