Atlus explains why their games are often in low supply

Demon's Souls box art.

It is no secret that Atlus-published video games usually become hard to find after being on the market for a short period of time. This has caused prices to quickly rise up due to the games being rare. Aram Jabbari, Atlus’ Manager of Public Relations and Sales, explained why this is the case in the comment section of the Playstation.Blog:

As a smaller publisher, we usually don’t manufacture much surplus inventory, but we will never intentionally undersupply the market. We build to launch demand, which is most often dictated by pre-order trends, so if you’d like to make sure you can easily snag a copy (and of course, we understand there are always plenty of games to choose from and that it’s not always as easy to pick up day one), it usually helps to pre-order.

That tells the retailers there is demand for the title, and it better educates what we produce.

Atlus recently released Demon’s Souls for the Playstation 3. To a big surprise to many, including Atlus, the exclusive title sold incredibly well in the month of October with more than 150,000 copies sold in the United States. Their next Playstation 3 game is 3D Dot Game Heroes.