Literally a used Switch game in a big, ridiculous bag with a “New” sticker on it. Imagine going into a GameStop with a game in a bag like this and convincing them to give you credit for it as “New”.
Don’t buy online from GameStop. Actually, just don’t buy from GameStop.
Same thing happened to me recently with their stupid BOGO sale, I bought Xenoblade Chronicles DE and Skyward Sword “New” and they sent me both packages with no plastic wrapping whatsoever, the pre-owned stickers very obviously ripped off and lots of damage to the cases. I went to a brick and mortar to return it and they didn’t reimburse my shipping fees, I had to call customer support for them to give that back to me.
I tried to just buy them new in store and they told me they “don’t carry rare games like that anymore.” I said fuck it, and went to my local Walmart for Xenoblade and Target for Skyward Sword and it cost me less. What a fucking joke. GameStop is trash.
My most recent gripe is with Amiibo, Nintendo literally announced some new ones recently and yet none of their supposed retailers carry them, aside from Amazon who have ridiculous upcharges on them. Went to GameStop and the employees didn’t even know what the fuck I was talking about. So if you can’t buy them directly from Nintendo you’re shit outta luck cuz good luck finding anyone that sells them for retail price.
This is par for the course for basically any physical Nintendo product. Ninty is categorically allergic to manufacturing enough supply to satisfy demand and the resellers figured this out about 10-15y ago. Any limited production run product is almost immediately bought out on Amazon and the other big retailers websites and relisted at a markup on Amazon/eBay. If resellers smell blood in the water around a manufacturing run of a popular game (ie: Nintendo is close to selling through the available physical cartridge supply) they’ll buy that up and resell it too. Nintendo would rather their products be unavailable for however long it takes them to decide to manufacture more (usually somewhere between two and six months) than have excess stock on hand.
Yup. And none of this is a surprise or new revelation - they’ve been trash the whole fucking time. Some folks just got so into their ‘big short’ fanfic that they thought keeping this company alive would be fun and profitable.
hopefully they had fun. it’s gonna crater sooner or later thanks to their business practices, and thank goodness. Mom & Pop shops like Pink Gorilla are way better any day.
GameStop went to shit a long time ago and should have gone out of business and folded their assets. Instead because of some redditors they think they still have a valuable business with loyal customers.
Once they hard focused on NFTs I knew it’d never get better
Wait, was that bullshit, or was that game still a ridiculously limited release in America? Does NoA really hate this game that much?
In Europe physical XCDE doesn’t really look that rare.