Some Super Smash Bros Ultimate amiibo are back in stock at Best Buy.
As reported by The Gamer, Best Buy has relisted Super Smash Bros Ultimate amiibo for Terry Bogard, Banjo-Kazooie, and Joker, AKA Ren Amamiya from Persona 5.
All three amiibo are based on DLC characters that were released months after the main game. Other DLC characters include Piranha Plant, the Hero from the Dragon Quest series, also known as Luminary, and Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
These amiibo in particular are notable, as it is possible that they will also see reissues in the coming months.
A few months ago, there was a rumor of a bigger mass rerelease of amiibo that would have started November. Since that didn’t come to pass, that means this rumor is effectively debunked. But it does point to something interesting about amiibo collectors.
The mass restock amiibo rumor seems to have been preying on the collector sentiment that Nintendo has to keep amiibo well stocked, so that collectors can have easy access to them, and should have the easiest path to completing their collections.
While Nintendo generally has an incentive to keep their customers happy, they aren’t likely to keep amiibo in constant resupply if there isn’t a real market demand for them. Nintendo was once a toy company, but they shifted onto video games around the time that Mattel saw their He-Man toy business, and Coleco with their Cabbage Patch Kids, reach their peak, and then spontaneously combust, in a matter of years. Let’s talk about that for a bit.
Mattel treated their toy business like a get rich quick scheme, and just made as many toys as they could. They pushed new lines of toys too quickly for children and their parents to catch up to. Eventually, they found it exceedingly harder to sustain interest, even as they tried new experiments.
Those experiments included launching the She-Ra cartoon and toyline, shifting the Masters of the Universe cartoon to the Snake Men storyline, and greenlighting a He-Man live action movie. After the movie’s release, the toyline failed and went dormant for a few years.
Subsequently, Coleco was not able to stock store shelves with their successful Cabbage Patch Kids to meet demand. This led to documented riots in toy stores, as well as the creation of a black market, where the dolls could go for as much as $ 2,000. Eventually the demand and market for these lifelike dolls would peter out too.
So, Nintendo has the benefit of hindsight on what things they should avoid doing with their amiibo toy/collectible business. They don’t want to flood the market with supply, nor do they want to make some amiibo so rare that a black market forms around them.
It’s likely that Nintendo is only rereleasing select amiibo based on market research. If that’s the case, then we will see smaller waves of amiibo restocks. At least, that’s potentially the case until the next Super Smash Bros game is finally arriving. If this is how it played out then we hope that at least, Nintendo keeps being careful and discriminating in how they manage their toy business.
Even as we speak, industry giant Hasbro is facing one of their least profitable years for some time, with their supposed reliables in Transformers, Marvel, and Star wars on the downswing. In fact, we reported on the unfortunate news that the company had fired most of the team who helped Larian Studios make Baldur’s Gate 3.
Hasbro is currently doing downsizing, with some analysts claiming they may even have to sell some of their toy IPs, and keep licensing them to other toy companies as they are now. Nintendo is only a few wrong decisions away from something like this. Fortunately, they seem to have better market instincts than the average toymaker.
