An Open Letter to Nintendo, EA, and an Increasing Number of Other Parties

Dear Sirs:

I make a decent amount of money, and I spend a very healthy fraction of that money on frivolous electronic toys. That means I am, potentially, a pretty reliable and attractive customer for you.

The flip side of having a decent job, as it turns out, is that you have to actually show up and do some work so that your employer keeps giving you a paycheck every two weeks.

I only mention this because that constraint on my time means that I'm not going to spend the free time I do have trying to run an goddamn obstacle course in order to purchase your products.

I'm not going to camp out in front of Target at 7 AM on a Sunday morning just in case the new shipment of Wiis comes in. I'm not going to pre-order Rock Band 6 months in advance before I even know what songs are on the soundtrack. I am not going to read up on cunning strategy from the mouth-breathers at fatwallet.com in order to maybe, possibly, show up at the right place on the right day at the right time with the right series of planets in concurrent orbit in order to enjoy the distinct privilege and honor of giving you my money -- through an approved middleman, of course! -- for your product.

I am not going to do your market research or inventory management for you. If you want to sell a lot of product, then you need to fucking plan ahead in order to get enough components from your vendors and build enough products to satisfy demand. Since I'm not a moron, I certainly don't believe you'd artificially limit the supply of your product -- but now that I'm in business, I can certainly believe you're too fucking incompetent to do the job required on logistics and distribution management.

In order to properly incentive-ize you to improve on those marks, I'm going to go ahead and keep pissing away cash on XBox 360 games that I can walk into a store and purchase without having to do any work a priori other than deciding if I, you know, want the game.

Warmest regards,
Neill