UPDATE: We've reached out to Namco Bandai UK, who got back to us to say that gamers who pre-ordered Ni no Kuni through UK retailers shouldn't have any issues with receiving their Wizard Edition when the game launches in the region.
Hundreds of customers who pre-ordered the limited edition (seen above) of Namco Bandai’s newest game, Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, have found themselves without a copy as the publisher appears to have run out of stock and is unable to fulfill demand. This development is in spite of accepting the pre-orders in the first place.
Priced at $99, the so-called “Wizard Edition” of Ni No Kuni was announced as sold out not too long after the publisher started taking pre-orders on its own online store. The transactions were done through Digital River.
Customers have since discovered that a scalp site called PlayCanada, which does a business of buying limited editions of games and re-selling them at several times their original price, is stocking over 220 copies of the “Wizard Edition” of Ni No Kuni, and has sold each of them for $400.
PlayCanada is selling these overpriced copies through Ebay. A listing can be seen below:
One user going by “user_113925” on the official Namco forums asked: “How is it that PlayCanada has over 220 copies, while people who preordered can't even get a copy legitimately? Isn't that kind of the point of preordering?”
Fans speculate that PlayCanada may have purchased its copies from Digital River, which acquired the copies legitimately, and may have conspired to re-sell them through the scalper at a much higher price. There's no evidence to suggest that this may actually be the case, but we'll be following up with Namco Bandai to understand what we can about the situation.
Customers affected by this apparent scam have since begun a Facebook campaign to to complain about their canceled copies.
I will update this story as it develops.
