If you’ve tried to buy a pack of Pokémon TCG cards in recent times, you’ll already know what a shitshow it’s all become. As we’ve been reporting, the last six months has seen the trading card game’s explosion in popularity lead to an epidemic of scalping, leaving new cards all but unavailable to the regular players and collectors. Now, but not for the first time, The Pokémon Company has promised it will be addressing these shortages. It’s just that their words don’t really match reality.
In a new statement issued on the eve of the release of the next set Journey Together, and posted to socials by Serebii’s Joe Merrick, The Pokémon Company International (TPCi) explains that it’s aware of the difficulty people are having buying the cards, but promises that it is “actively working to print more of the impacted Pokémon TCG products as quickly as possible.” The thing is, that’s exactly the same thing they said when we contacted them back in January about the same issue.
Here’s a quote from the new statement:
We’re aware that some fans are experiencing difficulties purchasing certain Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) products due to very high demand impacting availability. We understand this inconvenience can be disappointing for fans, and we are actively working to print more of the impacted Pokémon TCG products as quickly as possible and at maximum capacity to acknowledge this.
And here’s a quote from the statement in January:
We’re aware that some fans may experience difficulties purchasing certain Pokémon Trading Card Game: Scarlet & Violet—Prismatic Evolutions products at launch due to high demand impacting availability. We understand this inconvenience can be disappointing for fans, and we are actively working to print more of the impacted Pokémon TCG products as quickly as possible and at maximum capacity to acknowledge this.
Which, given there has been no noticeable increase in availability of any affected sets in the two months since, makes this repeated promise a little harder to take seriously. It’s almost word-for-word the same! Those who’ve been able to buy a pack of Prismatic Evolutions without paying scalped prices are the very lucky few.
The new statement goes on to say that, “For Pokémon TCG product releases at Pokémon Center, we are committed to providing a smooth purchasing experience and employ technology that helps get products into the hands of fans first and foremost.” As anyone who’s tried to use the Pokémon Center on days when new cards are made available for pre-order will tell you, this simply isn’t true.
The statement continues, “Currently, Pokémon Center implements a virtual queue for certain products to help provide a more seamless purchasing process during periods of increased site traffic.”
But TPCi has to know this isn’t working. When pre-orders for May’s set, Destined Rivals, went live this week, the site was just broken for hours. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you’d see the “queue” screen, but in my experience it never resolved to the site, and more often there was simply a message saying the site was down for repairs. To describe this as “seamless” is quite something.
By the time I was able to access the site, everything was of course sold out. In the past, even when the site hasn’t gone down, product has been marked as sold out within moments of being added. And limiting purchase numbers does almost nothing against an army of bots that can make multiple purchases to multiple accounts.
It just all sucks. Tomorrow, people will line up outside stores in desperate hope of being able to find some Journey Together product, and many will miss out. Scalpers will do all they can to scoop the majority of the cards, and kids and collectors will be disappointed. What we need at this point is not a copypasta of a statement issued two-and-a-half months ago, re-promising the same things that clearly haven’t happened.
We need The Pokémon Company to get on top of this, to actually start printing and delivering product to retailers (I’ve spoken to specialist shop owners who say they cannot get answers, let alone cards to sell), and more than anything else, to drop the disingenuous statements and offer a bit more honesty and clarity. We’ve reached out to TPCi to ask for that, to get some specifics on how much more product it intends to print and how, and what practical plans it has for its websites given things clearly aren’t “seamless.”
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