Nintendo’s Sanrio Animal Crossing event ruined by scalpers and purchase bots
If there is one thing that 2020-2021 has taught us about the video game market is that the garbage people who make their living off scalping in-demand items will absolutely ruin any sort of launch people are excited for. Any hope of having a good press day where you can show people happily holding the thing they waited for has now been replaced by negative moments and news beats showcasing these monsters on Twitter standing before their pile of bot-assisted gains.
Unsurprisingly, businesses have not really learned from this. Well, at least in America where we absolutely refuse to enact the anti-scalping legislation that other countries have effectively made work for years now. They don’t really seem pressed as they’re making money, though they’re no longer getting the positive press anymore.
Today’s prime example was the Sanrio Animal Crossing crossover event. Much like what happened during Animal Crossing: New Leaf‘s run, Sanrio has released content with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, bringing in special villagers, furniture and clothing based on the famous Sanrio characters. The catch is that you need to go to Target stores to pick up the physical Amiibo cards that will allow you to unlock the event/items.
Now, for me, I was lucky to have the cards from the previous event for New Leaf (the cards that came out today were reprints of the originals) so that’s how I was able to showcase what they give you, like in the case of Rilla’s Hello Kitty stuff and Marty’s Pompompurin stuff — so I got mine. But getting on Twitter today shows a lot of people did not get theirs. Here are just a few examples, showcasing why Sanrio is one of the top trending things on Twitter this morning. Probably not in way Sanrio wanted.
https://twitter.com/Prof_Jay_Gaming/status/1375434614290927622
Woke up super early for the animal crossing Sanrio amiibo cards just for this error >_< bro I am tired pic.twitter.com/WsvY2XUpie
— dex ✦ (@dexdaina) March 26, 2021
@Target how come I’m getting this error for every single store when I try to purchase Sanrio amiibo cards? Are they sold out at every single store already? pic.twitter.com/2I5u7Nj609
— con ♡ (@n0rnbear) March 26, 2021
In fact, by the time that I had posted these three examples, Twitter’s trending switched it from simply saying “Sanrio” in Trending to posting the exact reason why it’s trending… which is not a great reason for something to trend.
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It currently says, “Animals Crossing Sanrio amiibo cards sell out in less than a minute, leaving some shoppers disappointed they missed out on snagging a set.”
Let me tell you if there’s one thing both Sanrio or Nintendo don’t want, it’s one of their big events trending with the word “disappointed”.
Now, is Nintendo kind of at fault for doing yet another “limited availability” event? Absolutely. But is this mostly just a big example to show why scalpers are awful people and that we need to enact proper legislation against them? ABSOLUTELY.
In the meantime, I definitely will not go on record and say that it might just be worth it to hop on Amazon and get NFC card replicas from people who duplicate them. No way.