Nintendo not happy about "Amiiqo"

[MASTACHIEFPWN]

I get that people don't like how scarce Amiibos are, but making every single one (and all variations) be available via internet as well as the DLC that comes with them, while not given Nintendo a single penny is NOT the way to deal with it.

I agree that this isn't justified, but Nintendo really needs to get better with stocking their shit. It's like they've inadvertently created a black market for half their products, and sometimes large retailers play along with it. (Used copies of some Wii games are advertised as costing over 60$ on gamestop's website) I would have expected something like this to appear sooner than it did, but once again, that doesn't justify it.

 

[Treeberry]

I know I'm not supposed to, but I can't help feeling a bit of schadenfreude.

I never liked this toy collecting mania that's been gnarling its tentacles into the gaming industry, so hopefully this will burst that whole bubble.

Same. I don't like the idea of being locked out of content - however big or small - as well.

I've put off getting games like the port of Xenoblade Chronciles for 3DS and even Splatoon over it. I despise scalpers too. They call FO and D as far as I'm concerned. And those damned thieves who stole the Amiibo shipments too.

Edit: It'd be interesting if Nintendo actually bought this idea or did their own version of it. The normal Amiibos would still be there for collectors, purists and people who really like certain characters. For everyone else, you use this device. Perhaps you have to pay to unlock each Amiibo you want.

It's never going to happen though, is it?

 

[FPLOON]

You know, I would be more pissed as fuck if all of the "Amiibo DLC" was needed for a trochievement or some shit like that, but it doesn't... It barely registers as something vitally required in the first place... Still doesn't make this Amiiqo shit any better, though...

Other than that, I would have felt sorry for those that were only using Amiiqo due to lacking their preferred Amiibo, but I don't because they, and the makers of the Amiiqo, had to choose the illegal route probably out of sheer impatience or some shit like that...

You know that green squid amiibo can't be bought in the UK outside of scalpers and Nintendo refuses to do anything about it. Can't really be impatient when theres literally no stock.

So... They never came to the UK in the first place or is it just sold out? If it's the formal, then your last sentence makes sense... If it's the latter, then people can be impatient... Still, my second sentence in my first post is still plausible unless the Squid Amiibo is actually required to complete Splatoon, for example...

 

[Elfgore]

This situation pretty much shares my viewpoint with people hacking Pokemon. When you make things so god damn hard to get, I'm not gonna get mad when people turn to shady methods to get them... Now, this probably could be considered some form of piracy or theft. But this should act as an eye-opener for Nintendo to get their shit together when it comes to Amiibos.

 

[Imp_Emissary]

I will agree with those saying that it's not cool to use this thing to get your Amiibo DLC.

However, it's up to Nintendo to kill the thing. As has been shown before, the best way to fight piracy is to improve how you sell your product.

In Nintendo's case, they just have to make more Amiibos and they WILL sell (especially all the pokemon ones they're apparently working on).

From what I've heard from the people who make the Skylanders and Disney infinity figures, they really don't know what's keeping Nintendo from making more, and I've yet to hear a good reason for why they're so scarce.

If Nintendo wants to put an end to Amiiqos, all they have to do is make more Amiibos.
I mean, for god's sake Nintendo, you started out as a toy company! How are you so bad at this? Been out of the game too long? ;p

>_< Get good and get your Amiibo money!

 

[Nazulu]

I couldn't give a rats ass that Nintendo isn't happy. They pissed off everyone first for failing to deliver their scummy toy DLC practice. Now if they can get fucked over by their shitty Youtube policy then I'll laugh.

I wish they would just focus on what makes games great instead of spreading out with all these crappy gimmicks that will be redundant one day.

 

[Chaos Isaac]

Good. Screw Nintendo.

Amiibo's are a worthless addition to the Wii U.

 

[Fox12]

People want content. If the choice is between piracy and completely missing out on the content, then they'll turn to piracy. If the figures were readily available, maybe this wouldn't be an issue. You want to fight piracy, Nintendo? Make your merchandise available through legal means. You won't get any sympathy from me.

 

[FirstNameLastName]

I can understand why Nintendo are annoyed by this, but I can't really must any sympathy for them. Nintendo have generally been pretty shitty with these stupid Amiibos, so perhaps if Nintendo were providing the service in the first place there wouldn't be others stepping up to fill the void.

 

[RaikuFA]

You know, I would be more pissed as fuck if all of the "Amiibo DLC" was needed for a trochievement or some shit like that, but it doesn't... It barely registers as something vitally required in the first place... Still doesn't make this Amiiqo shit any better, though...

Other than that, I would have felt sorry for those that were only using Amiiqo due to lacking their preferred Amiibo, but I don't because they, and the makers of the Amiiqo, had to choose the illegal route probably out of sheer impatience or some shit like that...

You know that green squid amiibo can't be bought in the UK outside of scalpers and Nintendo refuses to do anything about it. Can't really be impatient when theres literally no stock.

So... They never came to the UK in the first place or is it just sold out? If it's the formal, then your last sentence makes sense... If it's the latter, then people can be impatient... Still, my second sentence in my first post is still plausible unless the Squid Amiibo is actually required to complete Splatoon, for example...

In the UK the Squid amiibo was only available by buying a limited edition of Splatoon. All the copies were stolen. Nintendo has not said anything about restocking them.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

Well, maybe the fact that workarounds for the lack of Amiibo will send the message to Nintendo that there are people who want the damned locked content but can't find the right Amiibos, people who want the content (and might even pay (reasonably) for the DLC) but don't give a fuck about Amiibo, and collectors who want two of one or more Amiibo so they can use one and keep the rest mint in box. It's a shame Splatoon's single player content is partially blocked by the rarity of some plastic statues and many other games have similar problems. Then again, with Nintendo's history with piracy over the decades, the higher ups might stay blind to the real problem and just blame this thing's existence on thieves who want everything for free.

I'm still pissed that the only thing to come out of the Amiibo card announcement were the Animal Crossing cards. When the card concept was first announced, I was under the impression that Nintendo was going to eventually release all of the figures as cards, so anyone who couldn't find their desired figure, didn't have the dough (money) to buy everything they wanted, and/or didn't have space for the figures could collect everything. If they ever do come out, I'd bet Nintendo will fuck that up too by not printing enough, again, or releasing them as randomized booster packs, negating the whole point of the cards to make it easy to get the rare Amiibos.

Nintendo only has itself to blame for this mess. Not only does this product somewhat solve the supply issues that Nintendo, the most financially stable video game hardware and software maker in the world, won't address, it also has added functionality. I never got (a technical reason) why the Wii U couldn't store Amiibo data on its flash memory when you wanted to switch a certain figure between Smash Bros and Mario Party. (Sell more Amiibos is the only thing I can think of.) This thing will let you do that and share your data with friends and strangers across the globe.

 

[Hazy992]

Well it's their own damn fault, they shouldn't have made the things rarer than hen's teeth and then lock content behind it. I don't feel bad for them in the slightest.

Then again, I wonder how many people are actually buying them just for the content? I bought mine simply cause I wanted cool little Nintendo figures, the extra costumes etc. are just bonuses to me.

 

[Callate]

Yes, Nintendo should have done a better job predicting, and keeping up with, the demand for their figurines.

But can we not pretend that this is a cause-and-effect relationship? There have been plenty of piracy-enabling devices that have nothing to do with the unavailability of the products they emulate. Yeah it may be easier to sympathize with that guy in a foreign country who pays twice as much or can't get the product he wants past the censors, but what's your cousin who lives down the street from two GameStops, a Target and a Walmart's excuse for that cracked hard drive attached to his console?

Nintendo should absolutely work on facilitating supply, but they have enough problems without someone stomping on the one fairly reliable profit pipeline they have right now; I'm not going to make excuses for or cheer on anyone who's participating. The Amiibos are never, ever a requirement for the games they interact with.

 

[Scars Unseen]

As a Nintendo fan I gotta say... fuck Nintendo on the Amiibo issue. Putting content in your games, and then telling people they can't have it - not "you can't have it unless you pay X amount of money," but "you can't have it" - is utter bullshit. It's bullshit when it comes in the form of store exclusive or pre-order only DLC, and it's bullshit when it's tied to collectible plastic dongles that they won't make enough of despite knowing people would be willing to buy them.

If Nintendo cared about their customers, they would have either put out enough product or allowed for some other way for people to unlock the content when it was clear that they were unable or unwilling to meet demand. They didn't do that. So yeah, fuck Nintendo.

Zelda when?

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

But can we not pretend that this is a cause-and-effect relationship? There have been plenty of piracy-enabling devices that have nothing to do with the unavailability of the products they emulate. Yeah it may be easier to sympathize with that guy in a foreign country who pays twice as much or can't get the product he wants past the censors, but what's your cousin who lives down the street from two GameStops, a Target and a Walmart's excuse for that cracked hard drive attached to his console?

Nintendo should absolutely work on facilitating supply, but they have enough problems without someone stomping on the one fairly reliable profit pipeline they have right now; I'm not going to make excuses for or cheer on anyone who's participating.

It's possible that the Amiiqo creators have been working on it since before the Amiibo scarcity became apparent, and the original goal of the project was just to make a new tool that could be used either for personal backups and to enable piracy for piracy's sake.

But, the way this new market works is well known to anyone who remotely follows any news about Nintendo. Many of these little figures are being snatched up so fast that you have to be there when the doors open on release day to grab one before a scalper does. I think the Amiiqo's price would be a lot lower if many Amiibo were not rare. It costs 50 pounds. I don't think the R4 carts that plagued the DS publishes profits were anywhere near that expensive. They mostly likely are now taking advantage of the shortages.

Also, a good portion of the Amiibo market are people who want a physical item, if they can even find them. This device isn't going to harm that portion of the market. It still will do some damage to Big N's bottom line, but it probably won't be anywhere near as noticeable as game piracy.

The Amiibos are never, ever a requirement for the games they interact with.

True, there isn't a Wii U disc out there that is just a drink coaster without a certain companion NFC figure. But, tell that to Splatoon players that want to try the locked challenges/modes, especially UK players that didn't stand a chance of buying the required Amiibo at retail stores because of the shipment theft a few months ago.

 

[RJ 17]

Take it away, Spongebob!

Seriously, when you've got Smilin' Reggie hijacking Amiibo trucks off the highway like some kind of action hero in order to drive up the scarcity of your product, of course people are going to come up with stuff like this.

At E3 when they were talking about that new yarn Yoshi game, they had a lady sitting in front of a coffee table with a bunch of yarn Yoshi Amiibo's on it...the joke that I - and pretty much every one of my friends - came up with was "I bet that's every yarn Yoshi Amiibo they created."

While the Amiibo's started out as a decent idea, Nintendo has done gone and fucked it up, thus leading to a product such as this being an inevitability.

 

[Silverbane7]

if they realy want to kill this...then they should get off their behinds and make the amiibo CARD versions available.
and not just in the dumb-arse 3 cards a pack, £4.99 and upwards animal crossing HHD version ones ether.

lets face it. given the choice, only collectors (and scalpers) are going to plump for the figures, when they can collect em as cards.
your average amiibo (want to be) user would prefer to pay that fiver and get some cards, even in a blind pack.
Collectors are a seperate thing though. they are the reason the figures cost so much.
yes, they have a right to be richer than us, and they have a right to spend money on things they want, even and up to spending hundreds of dollar/pounds/whatever to get what they want.
but at the same time, these things were supposed to be part of games, mostly for kids. us grown ups were supposed to buy them for our kids, not to stick them in a box or hang their unopen'd boxes on the wall like they were star wars figurines.

thats where the card based ones come in. they can be made cheaper, supply the kids and user market and keep the poorer half of the buying market happy.
the figures can keep their price (because they are figures, lol and because they can stay rare and collectable) and the Collectors can keep them highly priced and rare. when one comes along and has a defect, they can still go for a high price.
i dont think the cards would make that big a dent on the figures popularity, at least, not with the collectors and adults.
Ninty can still churn out the cards fast, the figures slow and everyone gets what they want....

 

[Quellist]

You know what? Fuck you Nintendo! You had this coming with you're 1)Artifical Scarcity, 2)Ridiculous Prices and 3)The whole 'stolen shipment' Debacle.

Not fucking sorry at all, in fact i'm glad and i'd shake these pirates by the hand and buy them a drink if i met them!

 

[Andy Shandy]

I'm surprised it took so long, honestly. And while I understand why Nintendo aren't happy with it, if I'm honest, it's hard to have any sympathy for them in this situation.

At this point, Nintendo have either been oblivious or obnoxious about Amiibo.

 

[Lightknight]

This is the inevitable conclusion of Nintendo failing to meet the needs of consumers and consumers just looking elsewhere.

I would be more concerned for Nintendo if they weren't constantly sold out of everything. So you can't rightly say they're losing sales since the figurines are what most people are buying them for.

Are the consumers doing this being unethical? Sure, it's pirating DLC. But Nintendo is causing consumers to be desperate and this is what is going to happen.