Pokemon is not obligated to adhere to any sort of secondary market expectations, but at the same time, they have to acknowledge that their decisions WILL impact the opinions of their consumers. It is a bad PR move towards those that do care about the value of their cards. Whether it is their primary M.O. to cater to this demographic or not, they can't just IGNORE the message their decisions send either. Should a politician be bound to cater to each of their constituents demands? Of course not, but don't expect them to vote for you in the next election either. This ties into the first point you made as well, where all investor markets can fluctuate, but you don't see Tops or Upper Deck re-releasing old rare baseball rookie cards into the market 10 years after the fact because it will spike a sale and allow "everyone to have one". Its called being responsible with your product. I understand that TCGs are a difficult breed because they have to cater to both players and collectors, but while Pokemon is a GAME, it is ALSO a collectible, and if you aren't willing to at least respect the interests of the half of the games fans who DO collect ( and hey, a large motive behind collecting IS value, especially in a rough economy where some degree of return on cards, if necessary, is a nice safety net for your disposable income ) then that is being selfish.
I've bolded the largest logical fallacy in your argument. You're making the presumption that the demand of the collector is the same demand as the player, and that the demand quantity of the collector is the same quantity demand of the player. While there are certainly players who are collectors who may be a bit peeved at this, I would argue that the position is probably not as a bad as you make it out to be.
The thing is that collecting is not a hard-set habit: there's no set fact saying 'hey, this is how you collect and how you should collect.' Having one Yanmega Prime is as equally valid as having four or five Yanmega Primes. Therefore, the act of having multiple Yanmega Primes is a purely voluntary act. The cost of that therefore is how much is invested by the individual collector and his or her actions. So, the logic is that the higher the investment, the lower the return in an upset of prices. That'd only be a problem if it was a either
A) a socially implemented act used as a means between ALL collectors (which is not the case)
B) an officially endorsed act used by Nintendo (which is also not the case)
The problem in that is that there isn't actually any beneficial standpoint from Nintendo to look at this: from a purely business perspective, they have much to gain by diluting the marketing with accessible cards and little to lose by chopping Yanmega Prime's value. As callous as I sound, that's the fact: the secondary market will not, at the end of the day, show up on Nintendo's invoices and books, and that is ultimately what matters to their stock portfolio and those investing into them.
Because there is a quantity demanded in the
competitive field, they will find it within their best interest to supply Yanmega Primes at a cheaper rate because it encourages more people to spend.
So, you may say, what about the opinion of the collectors who spend a lot of time and money into acquiring Yanmega Primes in multiple numbers (as there are many of them)? Well, the unfortunate fact is that they have much to lose by refusing to support Nintendo - failure to endorse the act in the future, depending on how much you've already invested, undermines what you've been doing, and as a result, many collectors have difficulty trying to break through that pattern: the incentive to stop collecting is, at the end of the day, just not strong enough because the value is just not enough.
It seems dumb, yeah, but it's sort of a perverse law of diminishing returns in action: the more you collect, the lesser the value of each individual card you collect is as the format goes on, and the incentive for you to stop collecting for some reason decreases as your investments rise. Only until bankruptcy or near bankruptcy that you'll break out, and a twenty to thirty dollar price drop is hardly that massive of a bank hit.
The price slash from Yanmega Prime's drop, I will state my bias explicitly, is a 'good' thing, in and out. Why? Because at the end of the day, it allows better access to many other players who have little alternative (Reshiram being the only big one) to meta-focused cards and allows Nintendo to give 'hook' newer players into the meta by giving them cheaper access to effective cards.
For those who have paid tons of money on Yanmega Primes and then find out it's dropping drastically, would you be angry? Of course you would: if I was in your situation, I would be too. Should you be angry? I may sound a bit cold, but no, not really.
Before I continue, I must express my statement that many times I have spent large amounts of money on cards only to find they have been devalued shortly after, and I have been frustrated by it. As someone in university, I am constantly broke, so I do take care to manage my time and funds. But I must still state my disagreement.
Y'see, Yanmega has been, from Canadian Nationals, dropping down in price for a very, very long time. It went from sixty to fifty to fourty-five to fourty and now it's expected to take a steep drop. There is no mass increase of prices before a steep drop in this scenario: prices have floated moderately for the longest time, so the argument of just getting it now isn't that strong of an argument because it has been in circulation at the middle price for a
long time.
If you have bought it a couple days before, would you have been angry at such a development occurring? Of course you would, but ultimately that's the way a market works - there's far too many externalities for anyone to keep track of it, and regardless of the market and the mechanisms applied, it'll always be a problem because this is an inherent feature.
The main problem is information asymmetry. Because we know things that Nintendo does not know equates to problems, and so Nintendo must solely based upon what they believe, according to the data they've compiled, to be the best decision. As such, they outline priorities that we ourselves don't know; either side knows things about the market that the other does not, and vice versa, leading to a massive disparity in regards to the proper supply and demand.
It's not a perfect system, but this is not something that's necessarily unique to Pokemon and it can't be rectified by implementing alternative policies because this is a purely secondary market issue.
