Nintendo Isn’t Releasing One Model of Its New 3DS in the U.S.

New Nintendo 3DS XL. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Were you excited about the New Nintendo 3DS? Do you live in America? You’d better sit down.

Nintendo said today that it would not be releasing one of the models of its New Nintendo 3DS handheld gaming system, already available in Japan and Australia, here in America.

It will release the New Nintendo 3DS XL on February 13 in America for $200. But the smaller-sized version of New Nintendo 3DS, which has customizable, swappable faceplates, won’t be released here—at least, not on that day. Nintendo has not announced any plans for a future release of the hardware.

Nintendo fans, the most engaged of whom were literally already picking out which faceplates they wanted to adorn their new system with, reacted with understandable disappointment.

Not releasing both models in the U.S. is a surprising move, since you have to go all the way back to 1998, when Nintendo released the Game Boy Light (a version of the black-and-white Game Boy with an illuminated screen), to find a handheld console that Nintendo released in Japan but not the U.S.

Since the Nintendo 3DS is the first of Nintendo’s portable machines with region-locking, customers can’t just import a Japanese unit, either, unless they want to only play Japanese games on it.

Both models of New 3DS feature a variety of small upgrades, as we detailed in our review of the Japanese unit last year. The 3-D viewing feature of the screen has been enhanced with a more stable image, there is a second analog joystick for camera controls et cetera, and the hardware inside is more powerful, allowing for prettier graphics if games choose to use it. The first of these will be Xenoblade Chronicles 3D, a port of the Wii game, to be available in April in Japan and the U.S.

A built-in NFC reader will also support the use of Nintendo’s Amiibo figurines. Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS will support the new figurines after a software update in February.

The smaller model of New Nintendo 3DS, with customizable faceplates, in a still from a Nintendo promotional video. Nintendo

But the New 3DS XL model doesn’t have, and that’s the swappable faceplates. While I decided to buy an XL anyway, since I like the huge screens and don’t really care about faceplates, other writers like US Gamer’s Jeremy Parish were, as of the other day, heartily recommending to readers that they purchase the smaller-sized version. Whoops.

So why would Nintendo make such a decision? There are a variety of potential reasons.

First, recall that Nintendo has actually phased out the regular 3DS in the U.S. The only models on sale here are the $200 3DS XL and the $100 Nintendo 2DS, an inexpensive low-end model with a 2-D display and a single-piece molded-plastic body instead of a clamshell design.

2DS is not for sale in Japan and likely never will be, so it’s not a factor. But in the U.S., if Nintendo only wants two models on shelves at once, this is how it’s going to do it.

In Japan, the New 3DS XL has outsold the smaller model by a factor of two to one. In the U.S., such sales data is not public, but we might surmise that the gap would be similar or perhaps even more pronounced here.

Finally, launching the New Nintendo 3DS requires also launching faceplates, and lots of them. Nintendo of America has often spoken about the difficulty of getting shelf space at the major retail chains in the United States, often in relation to its Amiibo figurines.

For whatever reason—whether you want to chalk it up to Nintendo of America drastically underestimating demand for its products, or simply the difficulties of distributing said products across a landmass that is so wide and diverse as the United States—Nintendo simply has issues delivering the same products here as it does in the rest of the world. Amiibos, some of which are impossible to find on store shelves here but plentiful in Europe and Japan, are the latest example.

Perhaps the launch of this model of 3DS and the faceplates it comes with is a big enough project that Nintendo feels it has to delay it until later. Or maybe it’ll never come here at all: Nintendo 3DS sales seem to be on a downward trend, and Nintendo is operating on razor-thin profit margins, so perhaps it doesn’t want to take the risk that it’s going to ship a more complicated product that consumers might not even really want.

Either way, for now we can add the New Nintendo 3DS to the growing list of Nice Things We Can’t Have.