GameStop’s Registers and Website Down Due to Amiibo Craze
GameStop's website and registers were unable to handle the masses of people trying to score amiibo Wave 4 and its exclusive Ness figure this week.
Obtaining all of the amiibo figures has been a bit of a mess since the tiny plastic toys have debuted, but there has been no bigger mess than what fans experienced at GameStop this week while trying to get their hands on the Ness, Robin, Charizard, Pac-Man, Lucina, Wario, Inkling Boy, Inkling Girl and the Splatoon three-pack. After the recent Nintendo Direct conference, GameStop announced that it would open up pre-orders for its new amiibo figures at 3PM EST on April 2. As expected, chaos happened on this day.
Polygon reports not many people have been successful as the pre-orders drove so much traffic to GameStop's website that it crashed the site. Even those who went to the store were unable to pre-order due to their systems being overloaded. There were many angry tweets from people who waited two hours to get their favorite amiibo just to get to the front of the line just to find out GameStop was then sold out.
Because of the amount of technical difficulties GameStop was having, it ended up changing the way that you could pre-order the amiibos. In an effort to save its site from the traffic, GameStop shut down online pre-orders of the amiibos. Instead, it was having fans head into its physical stores in order to get their hands on their favorite figures. This definitely worked out better considering the amiibos were sold out a mere 48 minutes after the pre-orders went in-store-only.
GameStop's website and register systems have long returned to normal, but the fans will never forget their struggles.
While GameStop isn't the only ones having issues (Toy 'R' Us' exclusive Greninja amiibo sold out within 15 minutes, Destructoid says), it was definitely the worst of the bunch. Now we'll just have to hope that Target handles its exclusive amiibo — Jigglypuff — better than GameStop. If we don't get one, we're using a marker on someone, Jigglypuff style.
Nintendo's Wave 4 of amiibo figures will launch on May 29. Good luck.