Because they cater to collection fetishists by limiting runs of games artificially to create demand. They are taking up the market while saying "this is a limited run" when they're beyond rich at this point. They're doing the collectors edition to Ninja Warriors Once Again and Shenmue III.
But they're not doing anything with Ninja Warriors. That's
Strictly Limited Games- there's a lot of these small production-run publishers popping up nowadays. The Shenmue III CE to my knowledge is for PC, yes? 4000 copies for a physical PC game release is a lot.
Shenmue III collectors edition will have only 4000 copies available. In America they run the market and limit production. In Europe people can pre-order their copy of collectors edition of Shenmue III right this second on Amazon.
So...get it from Europe? There's plenty of stores out there. I went onto GAME UK and pre-ordered the Zelda Link's Awakening LE set that we aren't getting recently.
But in America we have to deal with this fucking asshole company that caters to collectors who just buy just to buy shit while actual fans are sitting on our goddamn hands waiting for news of when we can pre-order because 4k copies isn't shit and could easily sell out within minutes.
Because it's all
entirely collectors who buy these games.
You have your rage directed at the wrong group- it's the scalpers who are making this difficult for people. In fact, a collecting group I'm in on Twitter recently went out and bought up a bunch of copies of some (shitty) hard to find Switch game that scalpers were going after...so they could then sell them at regular price or give them to group members who wanted it and couldn't get it in their state or country.
They initially had a reasonable thing. Limited Run on physical editions of digital games, but now they're so damn popular and rich that the run has no goddamn reason to be limited in the first place. They do it to inflate demand and cater to collectors like yourself who just want to collect shit. They flat out say they do not do reprints even if the product is successful. They're con artists running a racket to appeal to scalpers and fetishists who don't even like playing the games they sell.
Fuck them.
They're a small company and can only get so many copies produced and/or don't want to be stuck with too much extra stock. There's been interviews done about this whole process. Even if they sell out, there's still ways to get games from them. They have waiting lists and such since copies will become available.
Some of the more popular releases will sell out pretty quickly (and Vita, because Sony shut down production on new games after a certain date- this is why people go nuts buying those games now), but in general if you just want to get a game, it's pretty easy, especially with them doing more and more open pre-orders, so am not seeing what the problem is here. It's a lot of the other limited-run companies out there, particularly the ones in Europe, whose releases can be hard to get, for that matter.