Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, the critically acclaimed JRPG from Level-5, released this past Tuesday, but not everyone is happy about it; mainly because they never got their copies of the game.
Namco Bandai offered a “Wizard Edition” of Ni no Kuni for $120, which included a 300 page art book, plush doll of Drippy, and special DLC, exclusively through their website. Many people took Namco up on this offer; more than they were prepared for.
Digital River is the company that fulfills orders for Namco Bandai’s online store. They also do the fulfillment for other publisher’s company stores. Shortly after the game’s release date, many pre-orderers were shocked to discover their order had been cancelled. It turns out that Digitial River had sold more copies than they actually had in stock.
This is a regrettable situation, but one exacerbated by the fact that a company called PlayCanada ordered over 200 copies of Ni No Kuni’s Wizard Edition, and decided to resell them for $400 each. Of course, they received every one of their orders. The confusion is fueled by the fact that orders were limited to one per person. How did a reseller manage to get that many copies? The answer is that the one-per-person restriction was added after Digital River received a second allocation of stock. At first, there was no limit to how many copies of the Wizard Edition that could be sold to a single entity, and this is the time PlayCanada got their stock.
Regardless of the semantics, this is a situation that doesn’t make any consumer happy. Digital River is primarily to blame for overselling a game they did not have stock for. Digital River is also known for having trouble fulfilling orders from Capcom’s store from time to time (Marvel vs Capcom 3 comes readily to mind). PlayCanada can be blamed, but they were just taking advantage of an opportunity presented to them.
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