[paulgerhardt]

It's not my book. I'm just citing sources because I was very incredulous when I heard this is common practice.

It only works if you have THE hottest toy of the season - something like a product from Star Wars for instance - you create intense demand for the product but limit availability. Simultaneously you provide alternative, inferior substitute product(s) in the same franchise that's less desirable.

The parent HAS to get their child something for Christmas. The child is primed to want the desirable product. The parent drives over town looking for it. Exhausted settles on the substitute product with the promise the child will get the 'real' product after Christmas. The parent spends $50 on the substitute product before Christmas and $70 on the desirable product after Christmas. This nets the toy company $120 so they come out ahead rather than just making $70 had they stocked a large inventory of the desirable product.

Again. It reads like a conspiracy theory. I was surprised to find out it wasn't.

[morgante]

> It reads like a conspiracy theory.

I'm not sure what makes this a conspiracy. It's a producer deciding managing supply of their product to maximize total revenue—not colluding and not doing anything sinister. It's capitalism 101.

[simonh]

How does a company ensure that their product is 'The' hot item of the year? What if several companies decide to do this? It's bullshit.

[mrfusion]

Thanks for explaining. So what is the inferior product in this case ?

[jerf]

In the toy store case, it's whatever the parents settle for.

Since, as you are implicitly observing, Nintendo itself doesn't have one available, I would agree with your implicit argument that this effect probably doesn't apply here.

But it's still at least an interesting thing to learn about. It really recontextualized some things from my childhood, and forced me to reconsider the fact that sometimes, yeah, it really is a straight-up conspiracy. I mean, yes, there's a danger in reaching for that explanation too quickly, but on the other hand, you can't dismiss it out-of-hand either.

Still, in the absence of an obvious "part two" for Nintendo, I would expect that Nintendo has simply had a hard time calibrating demand for this product. I don't blame them, because it seems like I've certainly seen things that the Internet seems to go gaga over, but nobody actually buys them in any quantity. There's a huge amount of variance I'd expect from their analysis; this could sell anywhere from half as well as the original Nintendo to "a couple thousand units".

[x0x0]

I would expect it to sell really well to people who grew up with that nintendo and for whom $70 (game plus extra controller) is now an impulse purchase for the next time you have friends over.