Recently Nintendo has announced that they are discontinuing their wildly popular NES Classic Edition, which was just launched in the fourth quarter of 2016. Nintendo has faced a huge negative backlash over this decision, as many people never had the opportunity to purchase one due to scalpers picking them up immediately and selling them for double to triple the systems MSRP of 59.99. The question is simple, why?

This system had a massive demand, a demand that had not been met yet. Also, if they had originally planned such a small run, why did they produce it with a second controller as an additional purchase instead of packaged in the unit? This is a strange decision for a product that was meant to have such a short run. If you read Nintendos original press release, they simply did not intend it to be a long term product. However, Nintendo could lose millions of dollars in potential profit with this decision.

Nintendo. as a corporation, has to know that there still is a huge demand for this product and that consumer trust in the company is damaged since they have developed a history of undersupplying their products at retail. A possibility is that they have had a third party pull their support and licensing for the system, as it had quite a few third party titles on it. I find this highly unlikely though, as Nintendo would surely renegotiate license rights in the face of losing a massive amount of profit. It could be that the system was hacked to support other games not originally on the system, and unlike their other consoles, the NES Classic was not built with a way to update and patch the firmware. A third possibility is fear that sales of the NES Classic could damage Virtual Console sales on the Nintendo Switch, which seems to be a horrible decision if its the case.

No matter what decision, Nintendo has thrown away a huge amount of profit and further damaged their customer faith and trust. I encourage any readers to contact Nintendo and express your disappointment and anger at this situation.

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