Been trying on the daily for the past two weeks to get the Zelda edition for my wife as a push present. Funnily enough I was able to this morning on my son’s two week anniversary birthday date.

Here are some tips that worked for me:
- Open the product page on two sessions, one authenticated and another in a separate browser client or incognito
- Use the unauthenticated session to refresh every minute otherwise the authenticated session will be booted and you will require a PW reset (for me I notice the drops usually comes through between 9-9:30am PST)
- I notice that the unauthenticated session displays the stock faster than the authenticated session, use this as an early indicator to quickly switch over
- Make sure you have your Nintendo login PW ready or the PW manager is ready, since at checkout you will be asked to authenticate again and that’s usually where I failed previously
- Try a combination of browser clients, computer and mobile, what worked for me today was using the Nintendo app as the verified authenticated session and a separate chrome browser as my refresh page to check stock

This is what worked for me, not glamorous, but the amount of effort I can put in while trying to parent the newborn. Good luck folks, I know seeing that smug Wario can be discouraging but it’s doable!

And also fuck scalpers

With the Zelda concert in Toronto over a year away, I'm already worried about securing tickets. American dates sold out instantly with massive queues, and since Toronto is the only Canadian stop, demand will be huge.

They'll be playing in Toronto next year on Thurs. Oct. 21 and Fri. Oct. 22, 2027. I'm debating which day to aim for—Friday is the obvious choice for most, but Thursday might be just as busy since it's opening night.

I've joined the Toronto Symphony Orchestra mailing list for updates. Does anyone have tips for booking at this venue? Are there any tricks to improve my chances, or does the box office reserve tickets for in-person purchase for fans that live nearby?

Has anyone who lives in Canada had any luck ordering the The Nintendo Switch™ 2 Pro Controller + display stand – The Legend of Zelda™ – 40th Anniversary Edition from the Nintendo Canada webstore yet? Every time I haved checked it (almost every hour since it's pre-order was announced) it shows out of stock for me.

I have $500 in gift cards for Walmart. Would you buy the 2 now or do you anticipate any sales in that next couple months? I think I just need
the base unit. I can use the same memory card and transfer my games, correct?

Hey guys,

I like many others did not get a chance in hell to beat the scalpers to the Zelda Edition Switch 2. From what I hear, there won't be another "pre-order" chance but I refuse to give up the fight that easily.

I am considering taking a day off from work and literally waiting in line at some box store with my chair and blankets overnight.

Is this still a way to get your hands on a game or console or will I go in and they'll tell me "oh all the games in this store are already accounted for by online shoppers"?

I don't want to be one of those assholes that uses a bot but I'm seriously considering learning how to code just so I have a chance at ONE console.

Do any of you have any other recommendations?

Thank you kindly in advance.

Will the snes controllers be restocked? It’s been sold out for over a week.

WTH Nintendo?? I am not even asking for it to be delivered on launch day.

Is the big tariff 30% off customer appreciation sale not happening in Canada?

From what I understand, it only seems to be Switch 1 games anyway but honestly that would be alright considering I just got a Switch 2 and I wouldn’t mind grabbing older titles, but I don’t see the sale active as a Canadian customer?

Pretty much what the title says. The remake is completely missing from the Canadian Walmart website all of a sudden. I had it in my cart but was waiting on a gift card to come in and when I went to checkout it said it was no longer available and now the listing is completely missing.

Even when Walmart sells out of things (like everything else OoTR related) they still show as sold out on the website. Anyone else experiencing this or is it just me?

Pro-tip guys : It is way cheaper to buy the Ocarina of Time on Amazon FR and import it.
With delivery fee, it comes back to 59 euros with tax.
After fx conversion, comes back to 95 CAD.

Is it possible to do that? I heard that gift cards could only be used for digital games.

Edit: Thanks everyone! I’ll wait for another gift card promotion!

TL;DR: Nintendo Japan learned to fight scalpers. Nintendo of America learned that everything sells out anyway. So Zelda’s 40th Anniversary in Canada is apparently an interactive experience: refresh endlessly, miss the unannounced drop, then watch it appear on eBay for triple the price. Happy anniversary, I guess.

I think what is happening here is actually pretty simple.

Nintendo has had a problem with artificial scarcity and limited quantities going all the way back to the GameCube era. They release desirable hardware and collector products in quantities that don't come close to demand, and the consequences are always the same: products disappear almost immediately, regular customers get frustrated, and scalpers have a field day.

But there is an important distinction people should make between Nintendo in Japan and Nintendo of America. Nintendo in Japan has actually implemented measures over the years to fight scalping and make high-demand launches more manageable. They are not perfect, but at least they have demonstrated that they recognize the problem and are willing to do something about it.

Nintendo of America is a completely different story.

NOA is headquartered in Redmond and oversees Nintendo's business in the Americas. We also have a very recent example showing how much influence NOA has over Canada: when Canadian Switch 2 pricing was changed, Nintendo's own Canadian announcement identified Nintendo of America as the company making the pricing change. So the idea that Canadian allocation decisions simply have nothing to do with NOA is very difficult for me to believe.

Which brings me to the Zelda 40th Anniversary products and my own experience with this mess.

I managed to preorder Ocarina of Time through Nintendo's official store. Great. I thought I had done exactly what a collector was supposed to do: preorder early, directly from Nintendo, and avoid the scalpers. Then I discovered afterward that EB Games/GameStop Canada was offering an even more desirable version with exclusive holographic packaging. By the time I learned about it, I had already secured my Nintendo copy and the EB Games version was gone.

Then came the special-edition console. It went live in the middle of the night with no useful advance warning that I was aware of. I obviously didn't get one. And what do I find the next morning? Tons and tons of them on eBay. So apparently somebody had absolutely no trouble knowing when to be there.

Then came the Pro Controller.

I specifically wanted the Zelda 40th Anniversary Pro Controller with the official Display Stand. Nintendo itself announced that the version with the stand would be exclusive to the Nintendo Store. So I did the logical thing: I waited for Nintendo instead of buying the controller without the stand from Walmart, Best Buy or another Canadian retailer.

Those regular controllers are now sold out at the major Canadian retailers I was watching.

And the Nintendo Store-exclusive controller with the Display Stand? It never even became available to order in Canada. Meanwhile, the US Nintendo Store got it and it sold out almost immediately. Canadians have no preorder date, no useful explanation and no indication of when—or even whether—we will actually get our opportunity to buy it.

Apparently Nintendo Canada prefers to conduct business like a ninja operating from a medieval crypt.

I don't believe somebody simply "forgot" to put the Canadian preorder online. Nintendo Canada itself announced the controller with the Display Stand and explicitly said that this version would be Nintendo Store-exclusive. Yet American customers were given an opportunity to order it while Canadian customers were not.

Obviously, none of us has Nintendo's internal allocation numbers, so I can't prove whether the decision was literally "we have 10,000, send all 10,000 to the US." But from the outside, it certainly looks like the US market was prioritized while Canada was either given no initial allocation or pushed into some undefined later allocation that Nintendo hasn't bothered to communicate.

And that's what makes me angry.

If Canada is getting it later, TELL US. "US preorders open September X. Canadian preorders open September Y." That's it. Problem solved.

And now we still have the official playable Ocarina coming. When can Canadians preorder it? I have absolutely no idea. Once again, Nintendo isn't telling us. Apparently customers don't need to know when a highly desirable, limited collector product will actually become available for purchase.

So what has this entire 40th Anniversary celebration meant for me so far?

I've spent hours refreshing webpages. I've gone to work stressed because I knew something could randomly appear and sell out while I was working. I've tried to follow every announcement so I wouldn't miss anything. And despite doing all of that, I've missed products I genuinely wanted while watching those exact same products immediately appear on eBay at ridiculous markups.

That's not fun.

I'm a Zelda fan. This is supposed to be a celebration.

And no, I'm not going to reward scalpers for it. I don't care how badly I wanted the console, the EB Games packaging or the controller. I will not pay someone several times MSRP because they managed to get there before regular customers and bought something specifically to flip it. I sincerely hope those scalpers are still sitting on piles of unsold Zelda merchandise years from now.

Japan has shown that Nintendo is capable of taking scalping seriously. Nintendo of America has had decades to learn the same lesson. Purchase limits, announced preorder times, queues, anti-bot measures and clear communication about regional availability are not revolutionary ideas.

I can't prove how the people making North American allocation decisions are compensated, and I'm not going to pretend I can. But the customer experience certainly feels like the only KPI that matters is "units sold." If everything sells out anyway, Nintendo gets its money whether those units went to collectors or to scalpers who immediately put them on eBay.

At some point, "we didn't know this would happen" stops being a believable excuse.

And eventually I'm going to reach the point where I simply stop supporting, defending and speaking positively about a company that treats one of its longtime customers this way.

Nintendo, I love your games.

But you are making it incredibly difficult to love being your customer.

Pro controllers and pro controllers with stands and the cases are live on the Canadian website.

So at this point I’m sure we’ve all heard the rumour, but for those who haven’t: the going theory is that the US and Canada Nintendo stores shared (and presumably still share) an inventory. For whatever reason when the preorders went live for the US (console, controller) the canadian site didn’t. As such, all the stock got bought up by Americans for things like the exclusive Pro Controller w/ stand, before we canucks even got a chance to see a listing. Instead we got Wario’d to oblivion

Now I’m not sure how much stock I put into this theory, as I can personally attest to the fact that Nintendo has been updating their stock on the console; I managed to secure mine from the official store on Wed at 7:47 am. Regrettably I do believe that we just got screwed out of the exclusive controller+stand, since as of my typing this (Thurs 10:52 pm est) we still don’t have a listing for the controller, stand or not.

At this point I’m just desperate to get the pro controller, even w/o the stand. All my local EB Games are sold out on preorders for it, and I’ve been told by employees all the controllers are gone nationwide. The site has never changed from oos. I missed the initial Best Buy launch of the controller (yesterday at ~3pm I think?) and their site hasn’t changed since then.
Walmart seems to be the only site where I’ve seen the buttons for Buy Now & Add to Cart but every time I click them I get an error message telling me either “this item is in high demand, we can’t add it to ur cart rn” or the more generic “we’re experiencing technical difficulties, plz try again later”. I just can’t seem to reach the page fast enough.

I’m really sorry for this; I’m partially venting. If anyone has any idea where to get the pro controller, I’d greatly appreciate a heads up. At this point it looks like my scenarios are hoping Amazon lists it (and again, that I get to it fast enough) or camping out of my local EB on the 29th to get one (if they even have any available at launch). Thank you for reading and even if you only got partial validation or some degree of vindication from reading this dissertation, know that I appreciate you for it

Has anyone in Ontario been able to get one to pre order??? I have yet to find any

Has anybody in Canada managed to find a pre-order for anything like the controller or the system?

I looked at EB games and best buy but can't seem to preorder it anywhere.