Gadgetory

hey there this is Sean Hollister with CNET and I'm pretty pissed I just spent the entire morning trying to get the SNES classic edition the itsy-bitsy $80 Nintendo console it's going to be one of the hot items this holiday season it was not particularly easy because like many of you I found out this morning it had already gone on sale on Amazon and Best Buy overnight I didn't get any notifications in my inbox even though I'd signed up for those there was nothing to tell me that Amazon was gonna throw this thing alive at 3 a.m. or Best Buy around 10:00 p.m. last night so I missed that on those sales and I figured maybe this morning it'll be a little bit better this morning I heard intento was going to have it on sale again possibly at Best Buy possibly up to gamestop and so I did a little bit of digging and found out that indeed Game Stop was going to have it at 10:00 a.m. Pacific this morning so I got ready and I wrote up a post to tell our reader is all about the SNES classic and 10:00 a.m. rolls around and nothing it's not there on gamestop site I emailed the PR rep back and find out it's only going to be in store you have to physically go to a Game Stop store line up and see if you can get one of these things and just then Walmart starts their pre-orders so I click on the Walmart link and like okay is it really there a refresh link and it's already gone walmart sells out in less than 2 minutes ok what am I gonna do about that I'm not sure so I take a look over at at Target its target pops up its pre-order page and I'm I'm in there I'm trying to get my order in some other Sunnah editors are too it's in my cart I think I'm gonna get it all of a sudden it throws an error message I can't get my SNES Classic there either it tells me what does it tell me let's take a look again my phone o tells me sorry something went wrong please try again due to a temporary issue you can't change your delivery method right now I didn't really want to change my delivery method but there you go it gets pulled right out of my cart and all of a sudden it's gone it sold out at Target - what am I gonna do I run down to a physical Game Stop store I figure ok if they say you got to go there in person to get the pre-orders you got to go there in person so I'm third in line at this gamestop store waiting in this long line trying to get the console turns out they I'm there you know I'm there sitting in line for maybe 45 minutes the sun's beating down on May its first world problems I know but you know it's kind of annoying to have to sit there in line for this thing I thought I was gonna get on line I'm waiting there the Sun beating down and the line starts moving very slowly because it hadn't even started moving when I get there because they don't have their cash registers up and running with the allocations of the unit's their computers haven't been authorized to let people have it so I'm sitting in line waiting for the line to start moving finally starts moving very slowly 45 minutes later about three places behind the front of the line all of a sudden they're out of units two turns out this game stop the San Francisco flagship game stop store only gone 36 units and I was 43rd in line so I'm not getting one of those so I sit outside a little bit I'm doing my duty as a journalist I talked to a person coming out who's did get one of the units and she is ecstatic about getting the unit but even she's not too happy about the situation she talks about how how big a cluster I'm not going to say the whole red have a good cluster this whole situation was that Nintendo didn't make enough of these the retailers weren't prepared the web sites were down while I'm sitting there the GameStop app people say oh you can get one through the GameStop app so I pull up the GameStop app and sure enough the units are there the bundles are there but you can't edit any of them the cart the app doesn't work um here's the item in the in the end the app it says it's unable to look up the product what am I gonna do about that so I try the website game stops website is down I give up I'm walking back from Game Stop back to the office I figure him to do some real work now and on the way back I get I see a tweet from Wario 64 who follows these things very closely he says hey they rep the thinking so I take a look at thinking and sure enough think ik has some of these bundles but they are not cheap they rule the minimum they want for one of these bundles is 140 dollars and I'm not gonna pay a hundred and forty dollars for an eighty dollar product particularly when when these bundles here are sold by GameStop's company thinking think cake is owned by gamestop they're basically scalping their own customers here in order to expand in order to get them you to buy it of bundles with things you don't really need that are made by gamestop made by thinking in their own line of products you can get a cool little Zelda shield or something like that or they've got out like a Megaman Buster arm which I guess is cool but I don't want those things I might already have those things I just wanted to get one of these consoles and game stuff is making me pay extra to get one so I don't buy one of those either just as I'm getting back to work and getting back to see net headquarters I hear that the game stop site is finally up this is 12 130 now I quickly to help cool myself down turns out we still right now can't get into the game stop site still can't get these pre-orders taken care of all of these retailers push this thing live randomly like you had to you had to be refreshing these pages non-stop to figure out if you're gonna be able to get one of these because they didn't give anybody any warning that this was going to happen you just had to be there at the right moment at the right time in order to hit f5 and keep refreshing until you finally get one of these things and that really it really pisses me off and I can't really understand I still don't understand to this day why Nintendo would do this they haven't learned any lessons from the NES classic when they had the same issue last year limited amount of stuff a lot of people wanted it only folks who are really quick on the trigger online or scalpers who can spend all day looking at this or we're using you know bots that scrape these sites and try to figure out how to enter in that payment information those are the only kind of folks who get these a Nintendo's typical that's not really Nintendo's typical fan intends typical fan they you know they sell to families they want they want young kids who you know I haven't experienced these games parents can buy these classic consoles and share these games with their kids that's not really happening here unless those parents cough up a lot of cash on eBay or super savvy and if a tech editor like me can't get one of these units how doesn't intend to expect any of those folks to do it well last year after the NES classics sold out so abruptly at all these places Nintendo abruptly discontinued the entire system and I wonder if that didn't make any sense then I wonder if there's what's happening here with this system the SNES classic and the NES classic before that is maybe Nintendo is just trying to get a blister maybe they are just trying to say look at all these fans that rabbit for a Nintendo nostalgia these Nintendo products and get that to translate somehow in the game of telephone to Nintendo is great and maybe people go out and they buy the new Nintendo switch instead of these you know classic consoles but that means a lot of people miss out on these classic games because there's no way to find those on the switch either a lot of these games aren't and there aren't easy to buy on on a new Nintendo console and in fact one of them starfox to which I was really looking forward to playing there's an SNES game that was never been released before there's no other way to play this scammed a Nintendo hasn't said they're gonna bring to any other systems so they're that they get this publicity for being you know amazing to coming out with this game that people never got to try before coming up with this cute mini console where you get all these games for a great value but who actually gets to try that very few people now we're hearing that there will be some more stock of the console in stores at launch on September 29th maybe you can go to your local gamestop or Target or best Fire Walmart etc and get one of these things but in the meantime it's leaving a really bad taste in my mouth and in some of the other people who were trying to get these consoles today I just wonder how many people don't even know that this device went on sale today they were waiting you know they've probably been hotly anticipating this ever since it came out and unless they checked news unless they checked their you know their tech side like see net in the last 8 to 12 hours they don't even know that this happened and they're gonna come in they're gonna say oh I missed out it's too late for me and I wonder if overall that helps or hurts Nintendo certainly doesn't help me personally so that's that's mine for today on the SNES classic snafu and will bring you more about it on CNET com thanks for tuning in