@aaronsullivan exactly. People that do studying marketing and/or economics know that while artificial scarcity is a thing, it only works for certain markets, and the general purpose is to drive up demand so you can charge more... Amiibos are no more expensive than any other toys-to-life figures so clearly they’re not doing that, meaning they would be shooting themselves in the foot with such a strategy. Not to mention it’s not a good long term strategy for items such as this because consumers lose interest over time; hype is one of the biggest driving forces in gaming merchandise. The people who would remain determined to find them are collectors, who make up a minority of the market for toys-to-life - yes, there are a lot of collectors, but the bigger market will always be children. And based on pricing, that’s clearly who Nintendo targets, given they could charge notably more without much more effort and the collectors would still buy. As for preorders (as others have said), they can be canceled over the course of several months and are not reliable there because the entire goal of artificial scarcity is impulse buying. People have a lot of time to cancel preorders, which works AGAINST impulse buying. For most Amiibos, they don’t sell much during the second wave of release because consumers lose interest.

Artificial scarcity is GREAT for one-time products that are being overpriced, but in this case it would work against Nintendo. It’s far more cost efficient for them to do their best to estimate demand and try to match that exactly. Lower supply than demand is always preferable to overestimating demand (for any market), not to make it artificially scarce but rather because every unsold item is wasted resources for them. They painfully dealt with that last gen with the Wii U and it’s very understandable they’d lower their estimated demand after that to avoid more wasted resources. But honestly? Piranha Plant was a divisive announcement and it was likely very hard to even guess where demand would be for this Amiibo.

The biggest evidence that Nintendo isn’t using artificial scarcity though is they aren’t consistent. There are a lot of amiibos that have been way oversupplied. Mainly their more popular characters and some more niche lines like the Animal Crossing ones. The former is due to them being characters they know will likely continue selling for awhile. The latter because they overestimated how popular they’d be. They wouldn’t create artificial scarcity for some obscure characters because that makes less sense than their popular ones, they simply underestimate them because, well, they’re less popular. They usually bring them back in a wave two and it’s easy to find because there’s no more hype. Any artificial demand the scarcity happened to create died off before they could take advantage of it and the only ones who profited were scalpers. The last thing they want though is thousands of unsold Amiibos of each character though. That’s a ton of wasted resources for them.

Really... it’s all basic economics in the end. Supply and demand. The ideal is perfect equilibrium. Having 1000 less units of supply than demand means $13,000 of lost potential sales, which is undesirable. Having 1000 more units of demand than supply means $13,000 of lost expected sales. The difference is the extra units already cost them money, while the less units is just potential, and they can’t know what the exact demand would’ve been. It’s always safer to go lower for supply than higher, but the ideal is perfect equilibrium. That’s how you maximize sales. Artificial scarcity only works when you are willing to hike the prices up to take advantage of it, and even then it’s a short term strategy that damages the long term...