GameStop has addressed the Switch 2 launch day issue of consoles being sold to customers with broken screens and says it has confiscated the instrument behind the mishap to prevent it from happening again.
What should’ve been a moment of excitement turned into disappointment for some early buyers, who discovered their Nintendo consoles were damaged before they even got a chance to plug them in.
After staying up late to attend the midnight launch, many were shocked to find holes in their device’s screens as soon as they got home. The issue apparently stemmed from store employees stapling receipts directly to the front of the packaging, inadvertedly puncturing the console.
“GameStop stapled the receipt for me and my friends’ Switch 2s to the box. FML,” wrote one player after discovering the screen was pierced. “Genuinely insane, now I’m gonna have to wait three months for the restock”.
Fortunately, the major retailer has quickly followed up on this, issuing a short statement downplaying the scale of the problem and insisting it was limited to a single store.
“We’ve addressed a unique case of staples damaging Switch 2 screens — isolated to one store,” GameStop said in a post on social media.
“Replacements have been offered. Staplers have been confiscated,” it added, along with a short clip from the 1999 comedy Office Space, where an employee has his stapler taken by his boss.
Many users on social media have pointed out that Nintendo could have avoided this issue with better packaging, or at the very least, by not putting the screen right up against the top of the box.