Topic: Xenoblade for 400 dollars?! WHY is Nintendo allowing this to happen?!

[Stratos]

Amazon has to place orders like everyone else.  Determine how much they think they'll be able to sell, order them, and store them until someone places an order for them.

And, remember, Amazon isn't exactly on the best of terms with Nintendo right now.  They're sure not going to go out of their way to sell some niche game for Nintendo.

We have no reason to believe Amazon expressed *any* interest in ordering a large enough quantity of Xenoblade to make it worth Nintendo's time to release it.

Why is Amazon not on the best of terms with Nintendo?

[broodwars]

Amazon has to place orders like everyone else.  Determine how much they think they'll be able to sell, order them, and store them until someone places an order for them.

And, remember, Amazon isn't exactly on the best of terms with Nintendo right now.  They're sure not going to go out of their way to sell some niche game for Nintendo.

We have no reason to believe Amazon expressed *any* interest in ordering a large enough quantity of Xenoblade to make it worth Nintendo's time to release it.

Why is Amazon not on the best of terms with Nintendo?

If I remember correctly, the conventional wisdom is that back in the DS days, Amazon received a large number of DSs with broken hinges.  When their customers, naturally, returned the defective DSs to Amazon, Nintendo allegedly refused to pay Amazon for their defective merchandise.  This meant Amazon had to just eat the extremely high cost of Nintendo's ****-up.  I've heard similar rumors about the 3DS w/ the screen scratching issue (due to the 2 screens being different sizes).  Ever since then, Amazon's relationship with Nintendo has been frigid at best.

It's worth noting, though, that neither Amazon nor Nintendo have ever officially released a statement about why Amazon seemingly changed their stance on Nintendo hardware so severely.

EDIT: Hmmm...I can't find anything online about a dispute between the two companies regarding defective DSs, so I'm probably just remembering that wrong. I did, however, find a lot of stories about screen-scratched 3DSs, so there might very well be fire there.

[UncleBob]

There's been a lot of rumors and gossip about why Nintendo and Amazon aren't BFFs right now.  No one knows for sure though.

[nickmitch]

I heard that eventhough Nintendo knew Sony was gonna be at Amazon's birthday, Nintendo still decided go, but made Amazon promise not to invite EA because Nintendo and EA had just broken up and it would've been totes awky. Anyway, long story short, Nintendo gets to the party, and who's there? EA. Amazon said EA showed up with Microsoft, but Microsoft was only there for like a second. To make it worse, EA got Amazon the same gift that Nintendo got. And I heard that Amazon specifically asked Nintendo for that gift. Amazon said it was a coincidence (as if!) but didn't wanna talk about it because Amazon didn't wanna get involved in their "video games beefs". Nintendo was super upset.