Analogue’s NEW Handheld is...Out of Stock? The Drawbacks of a Shadow Drop

I have a very unhealthy habit of buying handheld consoles out of impulse the moment I see them on sale...I know that is not sustainable, just bear with me.

Check these out:

...I’m not staring, you’re staring...

These are Analogue brand new colorways for the Analogue Pocket and...they’re already out of stock. How is that even possible? On X, the company dropped a tweet two days ago explaining the new Classic Limited Edition Analogue Pocket. You had 48 hours to make your decision on whether or not to buy one of them. They also did the same thing on Instagram, which is a good thing because not everyone is on X.

But here’s the primary problem with this situation: because there was only one post on the release and people had only 48 hours before the day to decide, the people that were lucky enough to have seen their post were the ones that ended up buying the console.

Now, this action that Analogue just did, in gamer terminology, is what is considered to be a “shadow drop”. The release of the console came out of nowhere because there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING posted about it on social media.

Now, if the objective of the company were to just release the Classic Limited Edition Analogue Pocket without much social media presence because they knew they would sell out in minutes, then it makes sense to only send the bare minimum amount of social media posts in order not to bog down the server when it came time to make the product live.

But is this a fair trade-off to the gamers? This is the question I pose to those in the gaming industry.

Unfortunately, I was unable to buy myself one because I found 12 hours after the product had been released and, in my eyes, I don’t find that very fair to us. Even if they were able to post a couple more times before the release date, there would have been a possibility that I would have seen the post on social media, but they only decided to post one photo.

Let me know what you all think, should Analogue be posting more about their limited edition drops on social media or should they only do one post and have us fight for them in cyberspace?

You already know where I stand.