Hmm, seems Nintendo is in trouble for breaking European consumer laws...

Along with Valve, Sony and EA for Steam, PlayStation Store and Origin respectively. Apparently, not being able to cancel a purchase (like a pre-order) is illegal in Europe, and these companies have been ignoring the law for years. Here's an article about the decision from the Consumer Council of Norway (who are filing the complaint):

Filing complaint against four video game platforms for breaching European consumer law : Forbrukerrådet

Personally, I agree with them here. The fact you can't cancel pre-orders or do other simple things on these stores is anti consumer, and I definitely feel like the gaming industry is trying to ignore any laws that even slightly inconvenience them. So yeah, to see the EU actually crack down on it and force them to change their practices would certainly be appreciated here.

But what do you think?

I personally never preorder things, I buy when I can, when it's out. If I can't buy them because there's no stock, I don't mind, I just wait.
But I do agree that if I were to preorder something for some reason, and suddenly decided I couldn't pay or simply didn't want it anymore, I would like to cancel it, that's perfectly logical.
When you preorder something, you have to pay part of the price upfront. Cancelling said order will technically give that money to the store, so what the heck is wrong with allowing the cancellation?
I never knew preorders couldn't be cancelled, it just makes no sense to me how this is even a thing.

A bit strange for me to see this coming from Norway, because that country is not in the EU and how mostly its own laws regarding things like this.

Robin said:

Cancelling said order will technically give that money to the store

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What? You get all of your money back if you cancel a pre-order at GameStop.

Nintengasm said:

What? You get all of your money back if you cancel a pre-order a GameStop.

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Nice of GameStop to do that!
However:
First, I don't think we have a GameStop here, and if we do, I never heard of it here;
Second, it's normal procedure to pay part of a preorder to guarentee that the store won't lose money by ordering your copy of a game or a console, and you cancel out last minute.

You see, if 10 people preorder something, and 6 of them cancel last minute, the store will pay all 10 items regardless, and might not sell the 6 cancelled items.
Now GameStop specialized in gaming, which means their whole selling point are games, which means it doesn't matter if they buy a preordered item which gets cancelled, because they're still going to place it on the shelves and sell at some point.

Nintendo's response is pretty poor here:

The legal position expressed [by the council] that the right to withdraw cannot be excluded before the purchased game can be downloaded and launched is, from a legal point of view, untenable.

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In other words, they just say they disagree with EU law. Yeah, good luck with that. Looks like someone's going to end up in court.

Like, it makes no sense! How hard is it to allow preorder cancelling, when you get money in your pocket when people cancel the order!
Okay I'll be honest here, I don't know how preordering works on the Switch, if you pay a preorder fee or the full price or something, but I'm sure it's not that hard to code that in.

Another argument I read in Nintendo's favor kind of makes sense: Nintendo doesn't word this process as pre-ordering, they call it a "pre-purchase." If you want to get technical, you're not pre-ordering the game from them. You're buying the game and just can't play it until it's unlocked.

I mean that's a pretty hair-splitting distinction that doesn't stand up to serious scrunity under the EU's consumer protection laws.