Nintendo has taken some serious steps to thwart scalpers from taking advantage of gamers looking to get a Switch 2 at launch in Japan.
As reported by Automaton, Yahoo has chosen to block all Switch 2 listings on Yahoo Auctions. They will still sell the console on Yahoo Shopping, but they have still given their customers a warning that they expect the storefront to get messy on the day of launch.
Subsequently, Nintendo managed to talk to other Japanese online retailers that allow users to post their own listings to monitor for scalpers. Nintendo has a “collaborative system for sharing information” with Mercari, Yahoo! Auctions, Yahoo! Flea Market, and Rakuten Rakuma. These stores will issue takedowns and penalize vendors who violate their terms of use.
We have a clear image of how much demand for the Switch 2 exists in Japan. As Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa himself admitted, they had 2.2 registered MyNintendo users who were trying to register a pre-order directly with them. Nintendo already knows that they don’t have enough stock allocated to themselves to meet that demand.
Of course, they also already have some idea that that demand will also be huge with other retailers. Scalpers generally target products they know have high launch demand and potentially low supply. Those extend outwards from game consoles to graphics cards, Pokémon trading cards, concert tickets, and Comic-Con exclusives.
Nintendo set up their direct pre-order system themselves because they wanted to protect their consumers from scalpers. But because they can’t satisfy everyone who registered, they understood that this system would also not be enough.
So this is the reason why they have taken these additional measures in Japan. Nintendo may also make similar measures in the US, but they may not necessarily make it public. We have seen in the past that Nintendo will take strange measures, such as pulling listings of their games on Amazon in the US, to curtail not only scalpers but also hackers and pirates looking to leak their games at launch.
As many analysts believe, Japan is a bigger focus for Nintendo than the US. While the US video game industry is in such as state that we’re in the third year of layoffs and studio closures, Japan’s game industry seems to be doing well enough that they have been increasing salaries and hiring.
Nintendo’s strategy could be to secure a hugely successful launch in Japan, in such a way that they can immediately report success and profits from it alone. Afterwards, they can then deal with marketing and distribution in the rest of the world, as they slowly match supply to demand. That requires making sure the scalpers are completely defeated.
