The Nintendo 3DS is almost six years old, and, in spite of some promising looking games on the horizon, certainly winding down, with the Switch on the horizon. And yet, it seems like people just can’t get enough of Nintendo’s handheld- multiple sources are reporting that the 3DS is flat out impossible to find at any store in the US at the moment. Apparently, the 3DS is all sold out everywhere.
This means that specialty stores like GameStop, online retailers like Amazon, electronics chains like Best Buy, and general retail stores like Walmart, are all out of the 3DS. What is unclear is why this is happening, though we can probably hazard a guess.
Sales for the 3DS have been spiking ever since the launch of Pokemon GO earlier this year, with another sharp uptake observed with the launch of Pokemon Sun/Moon last month. Nintendo themselves had projected total worldwide shipments of just 5 million 3DS systems through to March 2017. These two factors coming together means that more people want to buy a 3DS at the moment than there are 3DS systems available to buy.
While this is, in a sense, good news for Nintendo, it also represents a problem- there are casual buyers who are impulsively willing to jump on the 3DS in the present moment, caught by the holiday shopping bug, who simply cannot right now, owing to there being no 3DS systems left to buy. If they can’t buy a 3DS now, they’ll lose interest and spend their money elsewhere, on something else- they won’t wait for weeks or months for Nintendo to restock the system to they can buy it. In effect, then, in spite of the 3DS selling more than what Nintendo may have anticipated, Nintendo are now somehow losing sales. They really need to sort out their shipments situation by the time the Switch launches.