A lot of Nintendo/Amiibo fans don't understand that there's a fixed AND variable cost for every production run of a product like a toy.
I assume these items are made in a mold. Therefore, there's a set-up cost for the machinery to be set to make a Marth character, then there's also the cost of plastics, whatever processses take place in the molding process, labor, and then packaging & distribution costs. This is a very rough estimate from someone who knows a bit about manufacturing, but not explicitly about toys.
Let's say Nintendo decides to cater to fans and do a 10,000 PC run of Marth's as a last run. Let's assume maybe a fixed cost of $50,000 to have everything set-up to do a production run, materials & labor amount to $2/figure, and shipping amounts to $1/figure. That amounts to approx.
$8/figure to have a production run of 10k toys from production to on-the-shelf. This is the cost of the unit, no profit figured into this.
Nintendo probably has an idea of what profit margin they need on these for them to be considered profitable. Let's work backwards from the $13/unit price to see what Nintendo would need to sell these at assuming they want a 30% profit margin.
Retailers have an average 40% markup from their cost for retail price. Taking this percentage off the retail price, this means they need to purchase each Amiibo from Nintendo at a price point of $7.80/unit. Let's also assume that Nintendo ideally wants to make a minimum profit margin of 30% per unit - this means they need to manufacture the amiibos at 30% less than what target or wal-mart would buy them at that $7.80 price point from, approx.
$ 5.46/figure. So under my unscientific scenario:
- Nintendo's cost for producing a 10k run of Marths: $8/unit.
- Price Nintendo needs these mfg to make 30% profit margin: $5.46/unit.
They could always spread that fixed cost over a larger production run, but how many people ACTUALLY want a Marth amiibo vs the loud online chatter? And what's the risk of producing far too many of these and then Nintendo sitting on Marth stock they can't give away to the retailers?
It's easy to say "Nintendo's missing-out on all this profit", but if you have any innate manufacturing/supply management knowledge, along with undertstanding Nintendo as a business has to have a level of expected profit with each decision they make, it's not hard to understand why they may not reconsider doing a second run of these characters, especially if they're going to offer the same in-game functionality in a much cheaper collectable card version down the road.