NoA: NA is N/A

Nintendo wanting its customers to buy an additional 3DS is a bit more presumptuous than the customers saying in response, “OK, but I want to choose the model.”

Nintendo over the past few years has had an odd need to kill its whales in an age where they can’t count on selling 90 million consoles and handhelds, i.e. when it needs it’s whales to spend early and spend often.

These are the people who would have bought every amiibo (most of the “rare” ones are readily available in other territories). Who would have bought every high-margin special edition Nintendo chooses to print more than 300 copies of, deliver to more than one store and allow preorders for. (I mean really, the material costs for the Hyrule Warriors’ disc and packaging were less than $1, and there’s no way a scarf could turn a $90 package into a loss-leader even if it was hand-woven with fair-trade wool by union laborers. It was probably sweatshopped by a 5-year-old in China for another $1.)

It’s happened before. Lots of times. The special edition of Mario Kart 8 has a similarly limited run only available at the Nintendo World Store in New York City. And I suppose that’s reasonable if you’re one of the 22 million people (2000 census) that live within 100 miles of the store. But what about the more than 500 million people (2014 figure) in North America who don’t? They have wallets, too, and NoA doesn’t seem to want their money.

Frankly, it’s a wonder the Game Cube adaptor for the Wii U didn’t receive the same fate. But considering how hard they’ve been to find, who is to say there were ever more than 300 of them?

And, after shorting those anticipating the regular New 3DS in favor of the (presumably) $30 more expensive New 3DS XL (a profit difference more than made up by selling a couple faceplates), they couldn’t even stock more Majora’s Mask special edition New 3DS XL’s that could sell out in 45 minutes of preordering.

This, of course, also hurts the less rich or less (let’s say) ardent customers by reducing their options. Untimately, they buy less too, and buy less in greater numbers.

Made almost four years ago, still applicable today.

For example, the way NoA handled the New 3DS turned what for me was going to be an immediate impulse buy into potentially nothing. I was actually very excited to buy something that I didn’t yet have a unique use for. Now, I’ll probably never get one if no game I like requires the New 3DS to play.

In short, the message we’ve been getting from Nintendo of America is that creating/translating/adequately supplying anything remotely special at all is a major hassle and they cannot be bothered to do much of it for any price or profit.

This is remarkable not only in the face of the crazy amount of variety offered in previous hard times (Orange Spice Game Cube and Virtual Boy mode with dual Game Boy Advances, anybody?), but also in the face of what NoA’s counterpart across the pond CAN be hassled for… which, over the same time frame, seems to have been anything and everything.

Come on, be a PAL

With only limited operations in China and low sales-to-population in Europe, North America is Nintendo’s biggest market. And it’s underperforming because Nintendo of America can’t or won’t supply demand. I’ll leave it to the reader to choose which possibility is worse: a broken supply chain with fabrication capacity an order of magnitude lower compared to the previous console generation, or the total inability to predict sales with no desire to correct mistakes after the fact.

Contrast with Nintendo of Europe. Their overhead is proportionally greater at their headquarters in high-tax Germany. They pay more for less labor with more workplace regulations (the law says new fathers can take 12 months of paternity leave at 65% pay, then return to their job. Just try getting an unpaid day of it in the U.S.). While Europe (if you include Russia) has a larger population than North America, the new world outspent the old world by about 50%, at least in 2013 and 2014.

On possible explanation for lower sales in Europe is the number of languages spoken. Each game has to be localized multiple times for multiple languages, and while NoA can rest on making most of their sales with English-language games (some, but far from all, are also translated into Spanish and French), NoE cannot. Nor can NoE translate every game into every European language. Doing just English, Spanish and French translations covers an overwhelming majority of those half a billion North Americans (and I’m being generous by including French; there’s still more than 500 million people who don’t speak it as a first language). In Europe, less than two-fifths as many people are native speakers of those languages.

Yet despite all these added expenses for fewer sales, NoE found it cost-effective and profitable to localize games that NoA passed on. Best known are the Operation Rainfall trilogy of Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower. But they also thought it was worthwhile to translate Another Code: R — A Journey into Lost Memories (Trace Memory 2), the sequel to a game that only sold 15,000 copies in Europe. Trace Memory’s North American sales were 9 times that, but it wasn’t enough for NoA to justify releasing the sequel, even after NoE had already taken on the expense of localizing it to English.

…And for some baffling reason, you can get all three Donkey Kong Country games on the European Virtual Console, but not one is on North America’s (they were mysteriously removed in all regions in 2012, but came back last year… except to NA), so even games starting prominent Nintendo characters aren’t always priorities for release.

Nintendo of Europe also adapted Club Nintendo 6½ years before NoA did, and their stock tended to be much closer to the variety carried by Japan’s envy-inducing Club Nintendo catalog.

All this gets me thinking… but before I share my thoughts, I have a contradiction to answer for.

Why do I have a 3DS XL instead of a 3DS?

Not because of the screen size — the screens of a regular 3DS were still bigger than the old DS, which itself was plenty legible.

No, the reason I own a 3DS XL is entirely due to engineering. The buttons are less flimsy. The circle pad won’t rip off so readily. The ergonomics are better; it has smooth sides instead of that weird layer-cake design. It even sports a better battery life.

It’s no wonder the original 3DS and its numerous design flaws has been consistently outsold by the 3DS XL and 2DS. They’re both much better put together, and the 2DS has a bargain-basement price. But all these reasons and more is why the popularity of the 3DS XL should never be reduced to its size.

The regular New 3DS has all of these same engineering improvements. It even sports a 33% bigger screen for those who still thought the original was too small. Though that does reduce the ppi of the display a bit, it ought to make for a less jagged viewing experience than the 90% bigger XL and its’ visible pixels.

Plus, you get the standard New features: NFC support, the extra shoulder buttons and stick previously provided by the Circle Pad Pro, head-tracking 3D and more processing power.

And you get other features not present in the New 3DS XL, like Super Famicom-colored buttons (which probably would be changed in the event it’s ever offered in North America) and interchangeable faceplates.

Many, many people on the Internet have reminded New 3DS fans that Nintendo of America is well within its rights can do whatever it damn well feels like. To them I say, Nintendo wanting its customers to buy an additional 3DS is a bit more presumptuous then the customers saying in response, “OK, but I want to choose the model.”

In today’s newfangled global economy, there’s the added bonus of being able to get any faceplate from any region, so I don’t have to worry about whether NoA bothered to licence a design for distribution in North America. After all, faceplates have no region locks.

But Nintendo’s consoles do. (Oddly, they used to be the only console maker that DIDN’T have locks, now they’re the only one that DOES.) And now it’s time to unveil that thought:

Wii UK

If I like the way Nintendo of Europe is doing things so much better than NoA, why not vote with my dollars and buy European region hardware? (Because of region-locking, I’d have to import all my software, too.)?

I’ve yet to spring for a Wii U. Would the assumption that NoE will release more games in the late stages of the Wii U’s lifespan than NoA make a European Wii U the best option? And should I also get a regular New 3DS this way should the New 3DS-only games prove worthwhile?

I’ve turned the thought over in my head. While I do not have an answer, I do have a list of the possible and definite risks and rewards.

Rewards — definite

• Being able to play the aforementioned Trace Memory 2, Disaster: Day of Crisis, Fatal Frame 4 and other such games with Wii Mode
• For that matter, I could use a UK New 3DS to play not only New 3DS exclusives, but also passed-over 3DS and DSiware titles.
• Actually getting the New 3DS I wanted
• Never lamenting I didn’t wait for a better special edition

Rewards — possible

• Potentially better New Club Nintendo loot
• Terranigma might get added to the Virtual Console
• Nintendo will treat the two years leading up to the Wii U and New 3DS successor(s) just like they treated the last years of the Wii.

Risks — definite

• Extra shipping costs
• Not able to easily find marked-down games (though the Nintendo tax could make that moot)
• Can’t rent EU games on GameFly

Risks — possible

• Nintendo of Europe might unexpectedly start sucking as it historically did
• Items could get hung up in customs
• Getting added to an NSA watch list for importing lots of computer hardware and software.
• People on the Internet could call me an idiot

It seems crazy and a tad pricy. How committed am I to doing something other than complaining? Are there any benefits and detriments I haven’t considered? Will Nintendo of America ever get its act adequately together?

Let’s talk it out.