We reported on GameStop’s announcement that they were bringing back the midnight launches for the Switch 2 at the start of the week. But what we didn’t realize at the time was that fans, maybe even fans who were loudly complaining at Nintendo, were going to make the pre-order launch a big deal too.
As it turned out, a lot of Americans went to pre-order the Switch 2. In fact, nearly all of Nintendo YouTube went online a few hours ago to livestream themselves trying to snag that pre-order. We won’t share every YouTuber’s attempt, here, but SwitchForce’s firsthand account is a nice summary of how things worked out.
From SwitchForce’s experience, Walmart was the only website that worked properly for consumers. Those Nintendo fans who got in were able to properly register their pre-orders. However, some of those orders indicated that they would arrive on June 6, a day after the launch date. Considering that June 6 is a Friday, it may be the case that Walmart’s systems did correctly figure out they reached maximum capacity to deliver orders on June 5, and scheduled those orders for the next day properly.
And now we get to the other stores, as the consumers who picked other stores did not luck out. Target’s website crashed almost immediately, to the point that even Geoff Keighley himself complained about it on Twitter. As if that wasn’t enough, Target then cancelled orders that were already confirmed to have gone through.
Best Buy provided arguably the worst experience between these retailers. The store was not up and ready to take in pre-orders for 30 minutes after midnight. When Best Buy did finally go online, the lines stayed up indefinitely. In fact, by the point Switchforce was making the video, he was still on Best Buy’s website.
Funnily enough, Switchforce himself was not able to get a pre-order on the air, but his mom managed to get in for him. As Switchforce explained, if you missed out on all of this entirely, you’re not completely out of luck.
As GameStop cheekily reminded fans, they are going to start taking pre-orders when their stores open later today. That’s going to be at 11:00 AM EST, and they will take pre-orders online and in stores, for those lucky enough to still have one near them. Jake Randall also confirmed that in-store buyers only need to deposit $ 50 to get a Switch 2.
Nintendo themselves unwittingly revealed by way of apology that there’s way more demand for the Switch 2 than the internet would have you believe. French retailer Fnac also revealed via interview that they too received a historic level of pre-orders for the console. While the popular Walmart Gaming Canada account provided the news that they sold out their initial pre-orders, we do know all the above mentioned retailers will eventually offer a new batch, possibly in a few days.
And Switchforce also pointed out that just because Amazon did not announce plans to take in pre-orders, does not mean that they don’t have their own allotment. It may be that they have an arrangement with Nintendo to mitigate scalpers. Speaking of which, Nintendo themselves have their own pre-order program, for MyNintendo users who meet Nintendo’s loyalty criteria. You can read about the stringent requirements to qualify for their program here, but the important thing to know is that they will start sending out pre-order invites on May 8, two weeks from now.
