North America may soon be getting a new variant of the Nintendo 3DS XL—this time in black. Originally reported by GoNintendo, a Canadian superstore outlet released a flyer advertising a 3DS XL with the subscript: “Available in new all black colour, and also available in blue or red”.
Although Japanese and European markets have been selling this color variant for a while now, North America has yet to receive these different XL configurations. Perhaps this is due in part to a lack of faith in the American market’s desire to adopt a system solely due to a differentiation in color schemes, but, according to Nintendo of America COO Reggie Fils-Aime, it’s a matter of logistics as he stated in an interview with IGN:
“”It really comes down to the nuts and bolts of how we manage our SKUs at retail, and how we do it in a way that’s effective for us and effective for our business partners. You’ve visited retail in Japan. One of the key differences in Japan is that the hardware is that it’s behind the counter. It’s not out and about. So in that type of construct, you can have a lot of inventory behind the counter. It’s a lot easier to support multiple colors. In our [North American] market, it’s all out there on the shelf. When you visit our retail, if I had to try to have 25 different SKUs out there, Wal-Mart would kill me. So what that means is that we have to be more selective and more knowledgeable in how we handle different SKUs.”
Regardless, it’s looking more and more like North America will finally be able to purchase new color variants of the 3DS XL. IGN got a screengrab (shown below) of a North American commercial airing on the Cartoon Network for the upcoming release of Mario & Luigi: Dream team, which shows a black 3DS XL being used.
This isn’t exactly out of character for Nintendo—they did the same thing by showing off the unique Pikachu 3DS XL in an advertisement for Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, announcing the system shortly after.