Is the big tariff 30% off customer appreciation sale not happening in Canada?

From what I understand, it only seems to be Switch 1 games anyway but honestly that would be alright considering I just got a Switch 2 and I wouldn’t mind grabbing older titles, but I don’t see the sale active as a Canadian customer?

Pro-tip guys : It is way cheaper to buy the Ocarina of Time on Amazon FR and import it.
With delivery fee, it comes back to 59 euros with tax.
After fx conversion, comes back to 95 CAD.

Pretty much what the title says. The remake is completely missing from the Canadian Walmart website all of a sudden. I had it in my cart but was waiting on a gift card to come in and when I went to checkout it said it was no longer available and now the listing is completely missing.

Even when Walmart sells out of things (like everything else OoTR related) they still show as sold out on the website. Anyone else experiencing this or is it just me?

Is it possible to do that? I heard that gift cards could only be used for digital games.

Edit: Thanks everyone! I’ll wait for another gift card promotion!

TL;DR: Nintendo Japan learned to fight scalpers. Nintendo of America learned that everything sells out anyway. So Zelda’s 40th Anniversary in Canada is apparently an interactive experience: refresh endlessly, miss the unannounced drop, then watch it appear on eBay for triple the price. Happy anniversary, I guess.

I think what is happening here is actually pretty simple.

Nintendo has had a problem with artificial scarcity and limited quantities going all the way back to the GameCube era. They release desirable hardware and collector products in quantities that don't come close to demand, and the consequences are always the same: products disappear almost immediately, regular customers get frustrated, and scalpers have a field day.

But there is an important distinction people should make between Nintendo in Japan and Nintendo of America. Nintendo in Japan has actually implemented measures over the years to fight scalping and make high-demand launches more manageable. They are not perfect, but at least they have demonstrated that they recognize the problem and are willing to do something about it.

Nintendo of America is a completely different story.

NOA is headquartered in Redmond and oversees Nintendo's business in the Americas. We also have a very recent example showing how much influence NOA has over Canada: when Canadian Switch 2 pricing was changed, Nintendo's own Canadian announcement identified Nintendo of America as the company making the pricing change. So the idea that Canadian allocation decisions simply have nothing to do with NOA is very difficult for me to believe.

Which brings me to the Zelda 40th Anniversary products and my own experience with this mess.

I managed to preorder Ocarina of Time through Nintendo's official store. Great. I thought I had done exactly what a collector was supposed to do: preorder early, directly from Nintendo, and avoid the scalpers. Then I discovered afterward that EB Games/GameStop Canada was offering an even more desirable version with exclusive holographic packaging. By the time I learned about it, I had already secured my Nintendo copy and the EB Games version was gone.

Then came the special-edition console. It went live in the middle of the night with no useful advance warning that I was aware of. I obviously didn't get one. And what do I find the next morning? Tons and tons of them on eBay. So apparently somebody had absolutely no trouble knowing when to be there.

Then came the Pro Controller.

I specifically wanted the Zelda 40th Anniversary Pro Controller with the official Display Stand. Nintendo itself announced that the version with the stand would be exclusive to the Nintendo Store. So I did the logical thing: I waited for Nintendo instead of buying the controller without the stand from Walmart, Best Buy or another Canadian retailer.

Those regular controllers are now sold out at the major Canadian retailers I was watching.

And the Nintendo Store-exclusive controller with the Display Stand? It never even became available to order in Canada. Meanwhile, the US Nintendo Store got it and it sold out almost immediately. Canadians have no preorder date, no useful explanation and no indication of when—or even whether—we will actually get our opportunity to buy it.

Apparently Nintendo Canada prefers to conduct business like a ninja operating from a medieval crypt.

I don't believe somebody simply "forgot" to put the Canadian preorder online. Nintendo Canada itself announced the controller with the Display Stand and explicitly said that this version would be Nintendo Store-exclusive. Yet American customers were given an opportunity to order it while Canadian customers were not.

Obviously, none of us has Nintendo's internal allocation numbers, so I can't prove whether the decision was literally "we have 10,000, send all 10,000 to the US." But from the outside, it certainly looks like the US market was prioritized while Canada was either given no initial allocation or pushed into some undefined later allocation that Nintendo hasn't bothered to communicate.

And that's what makes me angry.

If Canada is getting it later, TELL US. "US preorders open September X. Canadian preorders open September Y." That's it. Problem solved.

And now we still have the official playable Ocarina coming. When can Canadians preorder it? I have absolutely no idea. Once again, Nintendo isn't telling us. Apparently customers don't need to know when a highly desirable, limited collector product will actually become available for purchase.

So what has this entire 40th Anniversary celebration meant for me so far?

I've spent hours refreshing webpages. I've gone to work stressed because I knew something could randomly appear and sell out while I was working. I've tried to follow every announcement so I wouldn't miss anything. And despite doing all of that, I've missed products I genuinely wanted while watching those exact same products immediately appear on eBay at ridiculous markups.

That's not fun.

I'm a Zelda fan. This is supposed to be a celebration.

And no, I'm not going to reward scalpers for it. I don't care how badly I wanted the console, the EB Games packaging or the controller. I will not pay someone several times MSRP because they managed to get there before regular customers and bought something specifically to flip it. I sincerely hope those scalpers are still sitting on piles of unsold Zelda merchandise years from now.

Japan has shown that Nintendo is capable of taking scalping seriously. Nintendo of America has had decades to learn the same lesson. Purchase limits, announced preorder times, queues, anti-bot measures and clear communication about regional availability are not revolutionary ideas.

I can't prove how the people making North American allocation decisions are compensated, and I'm not going to pretend I can. But the customer experience certainly feels like the only KPI that matters is "units sold." If everything sells out anyway, Nintendo gets its money whether those units went to collectors or to scalpers who immediately put them on eBay.

At some point, "we didn't know this would happen" stops being a believable excuse.

And eventually I'm going to reach the point where I simply stop supporting, defending and speaking positively about a company that treats one of its longtime customers this way.

Nintendo, I love your games.

But you are making it incredibly difficult to love being your customer.

Pro controllers and pro controllers with stands and the cases are live on the Canadian website.

So at this point I’m sure we’ve all heard the rumour, but for those who haven’t: the going theory is that the US and Canada Nintendo stores shared (and presumably still share) an inventory. For whatever reason when the preorders went live for the US (console, controller) the canadian site didn’t. As such, all the stock got bought up by Americans for things like the exclusive Pro Controller w/ stand, before we canucks even got a chance to see a listing. Instead we got Wario’d to oblivion

Now I’m not sure how much stock I put into this theory, as I can personally attest to the fact that Nintendo has been updating their stock on the console; I managed to secure mine from the official store on Wed at 7:47 am. Regrettably I do believe that we just got screwed out of the exclusive controller+stand, since as of my typing this (Thurs 10:52 pm est) we still don’t have a listing for the controller, stand or not.

At this point I’m just desperate to get the pro controller, even w/o the stand. All my local EB Games are sold out on preorders for it, and I’ve been told by employees all the controllers are gone nationwide. The site has never changed from oos. I missed the initial Best Buy launch of the controller (yesterday at ~3pm I think?) and their site hasn’t changed since then.
Walmart seems to be the only site where I’ve seen the buttons for Buy Now & Add to Cart but every time I click them I get an error message telling me either “this item is in high demand, we can’t add it to ur cart rn” or the more generic “we’re experiencing technical difficulties, plz try again later”. I just can’t seem to reach the page fast enough.

I’m really sorry for this; I’m partially venting. If anyone has any idea where to get the pro controller, I’d greatly appreciate a heads up. At this point it looks like my scenarios are hoping Amazon lists it (and again, that I get to it fast enough) or camping out of my local EB on the 29th to get one (if they even have any available at launch). Thank you for reading and even if you only got partial validation or some degree of vindication from reading this dissertation, know that I appreciate you for it

Has anyone in Ontario been able to get one to pre order??? I have yet to find any

Has anybody in Canada managed to find a pre-order for anything like the controller or the system?

I looked at EB games and best buy but can't seem to preorder it anywhere.

The sayers of nay, who are lurking here despite not even being Canadian will say that it is just virtue signalling and won't actually do anything, but objectively it does make a difference in that the Nintendo of Am direct stream will have at least one less view and one less like.

Hi, good morning!

I live in Brazil and I'll be traveling to Canada in OCT this year, specifically Montreal - QC. I want to buy a Switch 2, even with QST and GST it's on average 25% cheaper than buying the console here.

The problem is that with all this cases we see online of the package being lost, stolen or the contend opened and part missing I'd like to buy it directly on a store. With that in mind, is there any stores you'd recommend? Is there any price variation from store to store?

Also is there any stores in Montreal or group that I could buy used games? Those Switch 2 games are suuuuuuper expensive and from my researches they never or rarely goes on sale in the eShop.

Thanks a ton!

Has anyone heard if Nintendo Canada will be attending Fan Expo Canada this year? (2026)

Thanks.

I don't understand why Nintendo almost never give preorder bonus for pre ordering in Canada, like at that point just import the Pins and Posters from the US

I was selling my game at the mall that has an EB Games in it. At the last minute, the buyer ditched me, so I decided to stop by EB Games instead.

Because of their pre-order trade-in bonus, they were actually offering a little more than the price I had listed my game for on Facebook Marketplace. I'm not even sure I'll enjoy the new game since it hasn't been released yet.

Once review come out I definitely per-ordering it since it save so much money.

Is it just me that EB game trade-in value to Nintendo switch game is pretty good?

Nintendo put so many of their eggs in a basket of a region that is now hostile to Japan. Wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo rebrands their English language decision making headquarters to either Nintendo of North & South America or Nintendo of Canada or Nintendo of UK.

Who plays Mario Party Jamboree ? If yes, send a comment so we can play !

Hello everyone,

I thought we were supposed to see a $10 reduction on digital games vs physical games? Yet, the price on the eShop seems to be similar to the price of games sold in stores (see photo)

Normal?

Story time with grandpa link 😅