Amazon representatives have been teasing the amiibo subreddit for a new announcement for a while now. The announcement was supposed to happen earlier this week, but the unexpected news of Satoru Iwata’s death prompted the team to delay the information out of respect.
The announcement is that Palutena will be an Amazon exclusive amiibo, making her the second figure we know of that will have retail exclusivity. Dark Pit is scheduled to be part of the same wave and will be exclusive to Best Buy. While retailer exclusivity has been a source of frustration for many fans, Amazon reps have commented that they’re taking special precautions to make sure fans and not scalpers are able to get Palutena.
1) We want to avoid resellers as much as possible, so she’ll be limited to 1 per customer.
2) We’re going to let everyone know when she’ll go on sale ahead of time.
3) That time will be during “normal business hours” (No 2:30am releases).
4) We learned from wave 4 that the time “windows” aren’t much different from just announcing a time, so I think that’s what we’ll be doing.
Also, we have a lot more stock than we’ve had of any other amiibo yet. I know we’ll end up selling out, but I think it’ll be closer to the Splatoon 3-pack or Charizard or something rather than Lucina/Robin in terms of how long they’re available (~15 mins after available). If you show up on time, you should be able to get one.
Edit: Another note, I’m going to make some requests regarding how these are shipped so we see fewer bent packages.
It’ll be interesting to see how these anti-scalper measures play out, as both Nintendo and retailers have been working to limit the number of amiibo available to single customers so we see fewer issues.
