GameStop, Amiibo, and The Mess that Did Not Need to Happen

Wednesday, April 1. GameStop releases the news that one of Nintendo's Amiibo figurines will be exclusive to its store, and that preorders for this figurine will begin online and in store the next day, April 2, 3PM EST. The figurine in question is of Ness, the hero from a 20-year old cult classic, EarthBound. The toy is maybe five inches tall.

This is the story of how last Thursday a very small boy broke one of the country's largest gaming retailers, and how that retailer could have handled it better.

Amiibo madness is nothing new. Nintendo releases their figurines in waves, and they're almost always sold out within minutes. The toys themselves cost around $13 with tax, but scalpers purchase them in bulk and sell them for $60 or even more. Nintendo has acknowledged that some figures are in demand and has announced they will make more, but some characters are not getting this treatment.

These toys are being sent out in waves, and April 2 was the date of Wave #4. Certain characters will be released to all retailers, and others (like Ness) are being sold only at exclusive locations. Jigglypuff is only found at Target. Greninja can only be bought at Toys R Us. But neither of these characters had the effect that Ness did.

I entered local GameStop at 2:57PM on April 2nd (Jack can attest; she was also there). There was already a small line, but I had no doubt that I would be able to make my preorder. The clock struck 3. Then it was 3:10. And the line wasn't moving. The cashiers could not access the system.

We turned to the internet. GameStop's website was not displaying the links to preorder the new Amiibo figurines- it was as if 3:00 hadn't hit us yet. We refreshed a few times, and by 3:30 the site had crashed completely. Nobody could access it.

The population of people who want to own an Amiibo is a small population of the gaming community, and yet it was large enough to crash GameStop's website and prevent the entire community from accessing it.

We waited in that line until 4:30. That's an hour and a half. Twitter told us that slowly stores across the country were gaining access to the store's servers, but the computers were moving at a snail's pace. Our own store's computer was taking at least ten minutes to load each page. Before the first person in line could make one preorder, Ness and other figurines were sold out. I left, not quite sure what to think.

On one hand, I didn't want to get all riled up over a tiny plastic toy. There are much more important things in life, like my GPA and my friends and family and my dog. On the other hand, GameStop's behavior before and during was downright unacceptable.

What could have gone better? It should not have come as a surprise to anyone that the GameStop website would experience massive traffic around 3PM EST on April 2nd. It's 2015. There's no excuse for GameStop not anticipating this and planning accordingly. They knew they would sell out within minutes, and the number of visits to their site would be at least equal to (if not much, much greater than) the amount of figures they were able to sell. If they didn't have the resources to handle that traffic, they could have limited the preorders to in-store only. They actually did end up doing this when their system went back online.

They slipped up on another front, too: social media. GameStop didn't acknowledge that their site was down due to Amiibo until 6:00PM. In that same post, Amiibo were acknowledged as sold out at 6:48PM. I was told at 4:30 that the figure I wanted was sold out. Mixed signals are not acceptable in this world of constant communication. GameStop's social media team should have been on this situation immediately, explaining to customers who were invested enough to sit in a store for the products they wanted. They could have been live-tweeting this. Instead, they tweeted about their weekend sales.

The fact of the matter was that after I left, Ness was "restocked" (in reality, it probably never went out of stock. Mass confusion and a buggy system spread chaos in GameStops nationwide). I managed to return and get my preorder (happy ending!), but all of the news I was getting came from rumors- posts on Facebook and phone calls and what the cashiers thought to be true. Other people standing in lines may not have been as lucky.

There was never any official announcement from GameStop. And more importantly, there was never an apology. Customers are still bitter, about both GameStop's handling of the situation and Nintendo's decision to release an Amiibo as a retailer exclusive item.

We have two instances of technology being used incorrectly- GameStop's servers and their social media. Because of the incorrect use of these technologies, people who were first in line at stores went home empty-handed. It isn't fair, and GameStop has done nothing about it. The most infuriating thing to me is that it probably could have been prevented, too, if GameStop had the foresight to do so. I can only hope they'll learn for next time.