I actually made money off of an exclusive back in the GameCube day. They did The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition for the GameCube that had both games released for the NES and Nintendo 64, with the former including revised texts fixing the original mistranslations, a demo of The Wind Waker, and various promotional videos.
It was going for 50-100$ on eBay. The only way to get it was to get a subscription to Nintendo Power during the promotion so... yeah.... I was getting a few dozen Nintendo Power magazines in the mail every month for a year and pocketing 20-70$ per subscription after the sub price and eBay/PayPal fees.
Funny thing was, if people messaged me and just asked how I got the copies I flat out told them "just go get a Nintendo Power subscription".
I can't remember how I got a copy of the Collector's Edition, because I don't think I had an NP subscription. Was it a pre-order bonus for Wind Waker as well?
In any case, I found it endlessly amusing when I would go to Gamestop and see used copies of the Collector's Edition marked for sale at $50 or so. Particularly with the giant "NOT FOR RESALE" text on the cover:
>In the United Kingdom, the Collector's Edition was available to GameCube owners who mailed Nintendo proof of purchase of one of several selected GameCube games, including The Wind Waker, F-Zero GX, Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, 1080° Avalanche, Mario Party 5, and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Consumers could also send proof of purchase of two titles from the Player's Choice range to receive the game
Yes! I got this bonus disc as a pre-order bonus for wind-waker. The "harder" version of Ocarina was a new triple A game all by itself and is still included in the Nintendo virtual console versions of the game on Switch and Gameboy from what I understand.
Wholesale usually requires you buy so many units, and it becomes hard to manage your inventory. Even if this guy couldn't sell half of these, he could return them all to his closest Walmart for only the loss of his travel. Also hot items are usually either exclusives or something you could not be a retailer of. I know there are people that buy things up on Alibaba in bulk then sell them here on Amazon and eBay...the problem is that helps counterfeiters.
