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The story
Since the late 2010s, Nike has pursued a “D2C (Direct-to-Consumer)” strategy, scaling back deals with existing retailers like Amazon and concentrating sales on its own official online store and flagship shops. The goal was to cut distribution costs and boost profit margins, but a post making the rounds on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (Geha) board pointed out that rival brands simply moved into the vacated shelf space — and ended up growing their own sales instead. The thread quickly drew comparisons to the games industry, especially PlayStation’s future software distribution plans, sparking debate between posters worried that even a strong brand risks losing new and casual customers once it disappears from store shelves, and others arguing that shoes and game consoles are fundamentally different businesses.
Nike pulled out of existing retailers, including Amazon, to boost profits, focusing instead on its online store and flagship locations. The plan was to cut distribution costs this way.
– Rival brands moved into Nike’s vacated shelf space, and their sales grew instead.
– Only die-hard Nike fans visit Nike’s flagship stores now. Support from casual customers who don’t care much about the brand has been lost.
Source: youtube.com / Original article here
What people said
Doomed
but trash-talking the "box" at this point doesn't even sting anyone anymore.
What's even the point?
There are already no casual fans left
Great! No problem then!
What are PS fanboys gonna do about this lmaooo
Got any evidence for that?
and as a result their presence disappeared, other brands' shoes got popular instead, and they faded from the market.
it's about online retail
Physical game stores have already cratered and there's no foot traffic anyway
nobody would miss them
There's no way losing physical store sales has zero impact
Famitsu's weekly sales charts would disappear entirely
Are consoles supposed to be "downloaded" too now?
I guess it's fine if you're planning to buy only after scalpers lose interest in the new hardware.
But relying solely on online stores, where lottery-system sales get wiped out by bots in seconds, is pretty unreliable.
Unlike the old days, this isn't an era where prices drop if you just wait.
Are you even someone who actually likes playing games, or just here for the discussion?
I heard that in Japan, people already struggled to buy even that "box" (Xbox) through online retail alone.
It's a thread about PlayStation's future.
Quit calling Nike "Concord" (the infamous PS flop) — that's just slander.
Huh?? You're putting Nike and Sony in the same category??
Are you kidding me??
Obviously it's going to end up worse than Nike!
Especially this part below:
> Rival brands moved into Nike's vacated shelf space, and their sales grew instead
PS isn't even on store shelves anymore lol
so other companies are happy to make good use of that freed-up space
Actually this is already happening
it's part of why third-party titles overall are selling better now
Guess most customers are just casual buyers with no real brand loyalty
Most people probably don't have the "it has to be Nike or nothing" mentality about shoes
The game industry's got it easy in that regard though
all you need to do is put out a bunch of must-play exclusives that make people want to buy the hardware
…oh.
They were still regularly stocked in retail
For instance, back in the day they even wholesaled the Jordan Brand to shoe distribution centers — they just narrowed the sales channels for core/flagship products
https://president.jp/articles/-/87777?page=1
This is a 2024 article.
This is about the future of the hardware, not the software.
I'm not saying Switch 2 replaces PS, but — Geha posters might not realize this — a game console isn't actually something people are obligated to buy.
If it's not there, it just won't get bought.
Plenty of people still buy after seeing the actual product in person.
Chinese gacha apps have substitutes (phones, PC).
Also, Japanese third-party big-budget titles basically don't sell in Japan anymore anyway.
Can't really blame anyone — Japanese third parties are busy cranking out lazy mobile gacha games, and even those are losing to Chinese competitors in production quality, so what can you do.
Actually, has there even been a third-party exclusive recently?
and as a result stopped reaching the people who actually admired "Nike" (lol) as a sportswear brand in the first place — their real core fanbase.
And on top of that, to the upper class it's ultimately just tracksuits (lol) anyway.
Upper-class citizen: This is going to get pretty technical, but as far as we're concerned, Nike is positioned as a mid-range platform.
So compared to high-end brands, there's about a 1.5x to 2.0x difference in texture size, roughly a 1.5x to 2.0x difference in mesh loading, and in terms of polygon count it's more than a 3x difference — that's the kind of gap we're talking about.
putting a shoe store and a game company whose main business is digital downloads in the same category 🤣
True, true
and PS, which is ditching physical media entirely, ranks even lower than that
Steam doesn't sell through retail either, it's direct-only, and yet it's the dominant force in the game industry
Can a service that's inferior to Steam in every way
really compete on the exact same playing field?
The library overlaps too, and there's barely any exclusive software lol
Retailers stock PC games because it's profitable for them to do so.
Do you really think they'd stock console stuff — a code-in-a-box that turns to garbage in six months, and hardware that barely has any profit margin anyway?
Yeah, the Air Max 95, specifically.
They should've just kept using cool athletes everyone admired, like Jordan…
Instead the replacement was that…
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
In 2017, Nike announced its “Consumer Direct Offense” strategy, pulling back from some retailers including Amazon and narrowing its wholesale partners — but since 2023, amid weaker sales performance, it has partially restored relationships with wholesale partners. Opinion in the thread split over whether it’s fair to equate shoes, a product with plenty of substitutes, with dedicated hardware like PlayStation; some pushed back by pointing to differences such as the existence of exclusive titles and how essential buying the hardware actually is. Also, while the source video frames the retail pullback as a bid to “massively boost profits,” Nike’s actual approach was a gradual narrowing of wholesale partners rather than a full-scale retail withdrawal — an easy point to misunderstand.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “Nike: “We’re pulling out of all existing retail and going online-store-and-flagship-only lol, profits are gonna skyrocket lol” → Results“.
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