Rise of The Shopping Machines
If you’ve been having undue troubles getting a Nintendo Switch lately, perhaps the robots are to blame? A report from Motherboard suggests that reseller bots are helping to drive up demand for the Switch, which translates to a more serious shortage issue. It’s the SNES Classic all over again!
The program is known as Bird Bot, and it’s been doing a lot of shopping these days. While we’ve been seeing shop bots around for a while now, this one is designed specifically for the Nintendo Switch. Also it’s completely free to download, which isn’t great. What does all this mean for the average switch buyer? Record-breaking costs to acquire the system, for one.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of Bird Bot, switch prices have gotten as high as $750 for the Animal Crossing edition. Regular units are sitting pretty at $500 a pop, which is way more than you should be paying for this product. The Discord for Bird Bot users has something like 1000 members at the moment. That’s so many people gaming the system! At this point, you more or less can’t get a Switch online without using the program. Hopefully sites like Wal-Mart and Best Buy find a way to stop this system in its tracks, lest we surrender shopping autonomy to the machines for good.