Nintendo has teamed up with Japan’s online marketplaces to fight Switch 2 scalping
Mercari, Yahoo Auction and Rakuten are all working to stop Switch 2 consoles being resold
Nintendo has teamed with three of Japan’s major online marketplaces to fight Switch 2 scalping.
In a press release posted on Nintendo‘s Japanese website, the company announced that it has formed a partnership with Mercari, Yahoo! Auction and Rakuten Rakuma to prevent “the unauthorised listing of products related to Nintendo, including the Nintendo Switch 2 scheduled for release on June 5″.
According to the statement, Nintendo and the three marketplaces will take action against ‘unauthorised’ Switch 2 listings, including “proactive listing removal” and the setup of a co-operative framework that will let each marketplace share information.
In a separate statement on its own site, Yahoo! Auctions said it would consider Nintendo Switch 2 a ‘prohibited item’ from launch until an undetermined future date.
The company said it considered Switch 2 an item that “may disrupt the trading environment”, which it defines as anything that has “high visibility, significant demand as high-priced resale items, and a high likelihood of causing disruptions such as hoarding or price spikes”.
Yahoo! says that any Switch 2 listings made on the site during its prohibition period “may be subject to measures such as listing removal by our company, or other actions including account suspension”.
Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa stated last year that Nintendo wanted to avoid Switch 2 scalping by making enough consoles to meet demand, saying the company’s main plan was to make sure players didn’t have to turn to resellers because they could just buy a console at retail.
Demand for the console in Japan appears to be extremely high, however, with Furukawa warning last month that a “significant number” of players in Japan will miss out on Nintendo’s own pre-order stock, after 2.2 million applied for its My Nintendo pre-order lottery.
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“To deliver Nintendo Switch 2 to all of you, we have been procuring a large number of components in advance and proceeding with production,” Furukawa told players last month. “On April 2, we announced the details of Nintendo Switch 2 and began accepting applications for a lottery sale on the My Nintendo Store. As a result, we received applications from an astonishing 2.2 million people in Japan alone.
“However, this far exceeded our prior expectations and greatly surpasses the number of Nintendo Switch 2 units we can deliver from the My Nintendo Store on June 5. Consequently, it is with great regret that we anticipate a significant number of customers will not be selected in tomorrow’s lottery announcement on April 24.”
Nintendo has since held more rounds of its lottery, with customers not selected in the initial drawing automatically re-entered into the next round of the lottery. “However, even with the number of units available in the second lottery sale, we will not be able to fulfil all the applications we have received,” Furukawa warned. “We deeply apologize for failing to meet your expectations despite our preparations.”
Scalping – the act of buying scarce products with the sole purpose of reselling them online at a much higher price – has been an issue in the video games market for some time now, dating as far back as the Wii and PS3.
In 2021, Japanese retail chain Nojima Denki implemented a new policy designed to combat PS5 re-sellers, which saw it writing the buyer’s name on the side of PS5 boxes, as well as destroying the packaging for the controller.
