In Japan, Nintendo released a gorgeous Fire Emblem: Awakening Nintendo 3DS bundle in very limited quantities, and sold it exclusively through their website.
Not only was the bundle sold in limited quantities, the influx of people trying to buy it caused Nintendo’s website server to crash, which meant that a lot of fans couldn’t complete their transaction. Furthermore, Nintendo didn’t announce at what time exactly the orders would go live, meaning that the bundles were sold off on a first-come-first-serve basis.
An attendee at Nintendo’s 72nd annual shareholder meeting recently brought this up with company president, Satoru Iwata, expressing his disappointment at not being able to buy the bundle due to the aforementioned reasons. Iwata apologized, saying that Nintendo completely underestimated the demand for the Fire Emblem: Awakening, adding that, unfortunately, while they wanted to reopen pre-orders for the bundle, doing so would have been in violation of a Japanese law.
Iwata says an outside attorney informed Nintendo that reopening pre-orders for the bundle would break Japan’s “Law for Preventing Unjustifiable Extra or Unexpected Benefit and Misleading Representation”. Since the bundle was announced as a limited product, it had to remain that way. Nintendo plan to take this law into account in the future and decide on an appropriate sales method while announcing new products so that their fans aren’t disappointed again.
Fire Emblem: Awakening will be released in North America sometime in 2013. Nintendo have not announced a 3DS bundle for the game either in North America or Europe thus far.
