Well, looks like I’ll have to be liquidating most of my inventory at cost. Now Amazon is requiring approval to sell any Nintendo products. Of course, this supposedly requires authorization to sell Nintendo merchandise or invoices from manufacturer.

All games I sell are used games. They haven’t been manufactured for at least 10, often 15 or 20 years. Nobody on the planet, except people selling 400-dollar sealed copies left over from the 80s and 90s, has invoices from the manufacturer.

This raises several interesting questions. Tomorrow, when the changes supposedly go into effect, will ALL used listings for Super Smash Bros Melee be taken off of Amazon, leaving buyers with only the option of shelling out hundreds of dollars for one of the few factory sealed (with invoices from 20 years ago) copies?

How does this help Amazon sell?

Of course, we know that won’t happen. My suspicion is that either:

(a) Dubious ASINs will be created to ostensibly sell ‘reproduction’ copies, yet under these listings honest sellers will sell real copies. This will, of course, leave customers vulnerable to exploitation by dishonest Chinese bootleg sellers (not that Amazon EVER cared about that, except maybe right after an article about it in the Washington Post or NYT, which is probably what inspired this bizarre, capricious, and arbitrary policy change), since Amazon TOOK AWAY their options for ordering authentic copies from the used market, which is affordable since sellers purchase them from various sources and don’t have factory-sealed copies with manufacturer invoices.

(b) They’ll reverse the policy, or somehow someone will change the ‘by’ box to something other than Nintendo. Basically (a).

© SOMEHOW used sellers who have been on Amazon for long enough, or who have the right ‘connections,’ will be still able to sell used copies, which in no way could possibly have manufacturer invoices.

I know it’s a privilege to sell on Amazon, and they can use whatever policy they want. That doesn’t mean I have to like the arbitrary and unpredictable policies that hurt customers, or Amazon’s tolerance of obvious bootleg sellers that is matched with a way of ‘dealing’ with the problem by randomly shutting down honest sellers who provide good affordable products for their customers.

Like I said, I’m happy I’ve been able to sell as much as I have, but let’s stop pretending the free market works. We all know that Amazon wouldn’t last 10 minutes without the networking effects.