@Tasuki It's not as gloomy as it sounds, I think. Microsoft isn't Nintendo. Or Sony. They can actually afford factory capacity to keep up (more or less) with demand.
I think if you can't get one now, there will be a wait to get one, through Christmas it will be difficult, though not necessarily impossible to get one. They'll be resupplying in December. But yeah, launch will be scarce from here forward. But I think by Jan, Feb there should definitely be a number of opportunities to get one. They should be cranking them out a lot more than cautious-Nintendo that takes a year to meet demand, not by increasing capacity, but simply fulfilling demand at their own pace until demand is largely saturated.
Nintendo just does the minimum required to get the job done to some degree of completion without spending any more than is absolutely necessary to meed demand over long tail sales (Plus, even by Nintendo standards, they under-produced Switch and had lowballed production capacity after WiiU - they weren't confident in the launch and didn't want to be stuck with warehouses full for 4 years like with WiiU.) Plus Series S will be absorbing that mass market demand the longer time goes on. As far as I know there was only one or two total production runs of WiiU ever - they thought it would sell like gangbusters following Wii, made a bunch of launch inventory, and then it sat there until Switch launched. They never had to make another run. They shorted Switch launch, afraid of the same if it failed, and got blindsided by Wii-like demand they had never reserved enough contract production to keep up with.
Console launches are always scarce but nobody does intentional scarceness the way Nintendo does it. It's fairly shameful how they launch products. Even Sony manages to ramp up production within the first 4 months to meet demand much better, though PS5 might have a harder time than XSX with apparently harder to produce parts with worse yields and through the roof demand for some unknown reason.
Keep checking through the month. You're probably going to see some pop up if you get lucky on timing. Gamestop being the MS partner this time will probably have some good headwind on inventory as well, if you prefer in person purchases at GS. They're more or less the "Microsoft Store" now after MS closed their own B&M stores after the lockdowns and partnered up with GameStop.
Can't guarantee you'll get one in 2020, but you won't be waiting until next September like with Switch....
@Kefka2589 At least you could choose fun games to play....Demon's Souls....Pffft.... The X is here! It's agony waiting to open it, knowing I have it now
@NEStalgia Oh yeah I know I will get one just a matter of when. I pretty much have up on the Switch and happened to walk into Best Buy one day and there was a stack of them.
I just can't believe how poor MS is handling the launch with such low numbers. When the PS4 was announced I was able to preorder it no problem and get one at launch day. This launch though has been a joke seriously places having only 8 preorders?? I honestly thought the point of a preorder was to see how many to have by launch day. For example a store had 200 preorders well you send them 200 systems at least. Never heard of a limit on preorders before kinda defeats the purpose of a preorder.
RetiredPush Square Moderator and all around retro gamer.
eBay prices up to $1000. This seriously pisses me off here I am hunting around for one can't find one and these ***** got one just to turn a profit. Seriously Microsoft needs to put an end to these people.
RetiredPush Square Moderator and all around retro gamer.
@Kefka2589 Oof. Well, at least they have your order in good standing. I'm surprised they didn't get it out the door, but I'm betting it will be before the 16th. They have todays new XBox orders, tomrrows PS5 preorders, and the day after's new PS5 preorders to all get going through the door in addition to their normal shopping orders and the "Month of Black Friday" ramped up orders to ship out...they can't loiter on the XBoxen forever. They'll probably get it out today, or at the latest tomorrow. If these stores can't handle the XBox preorder+launch orders, they're really going to be hosed for the PS5 orders!
@Tasuki Preorders aren't being handled too differently this time. The main difference is preorders went live in late September after months of mainstream fanfare and discontinuation of the prior product, amid a demand surge of a pandemic, and a production capacity shortfall. Last time, with PS4, preorders were dropped at 11:00pm, unceremoniously, on a Tuesday in mid-June for a holiday product. Only the hard, hard, hardcore were paying attention, pandemic demand didn't exist, gaming was smaller 7 years ago, production capacity was greater, and above all, scalpers were far less sophisticated for online sales. But with PS4, yeah, y ou could get your preorder in June (I preordered mine before the Sony conference was even finished for the night after they said "399.99" I was on newegg and Amazon in mere seconds...... ) - yeah some stores still had them the next day, sporadically. But anyone that didn't preorder in June was still screwed later on. I was REAAALLY nervous when I had to change my credit card info for both stores before that shipped. Because Sony compromised it....
A preorder should be exactly what you say. But the gaming industry hasn't used preorders for that purpose in a looong time. This isn't really a preorder. It's a pre-purchase. The supply was already fixed long before preorders opened. Only a certain quantity could be produced between when they started and when they launched. To have a real preorder they'd have to have started taking orders, in all practicality, a year or so ago, and at the absolute latest, maybe late January. That was the last time they could have increased production capacity to meet preorder demand. The factories are set up for fixed production runs starting a long time ago. And then they'd have to warehouse them. That adds cost.
I'm not sure how to fix that. Ideally they should have supply to meet demand, but I can't see them taking orders a year in advance, and I can't see them warehousing enough units to fulfill all 20 million day 1 buyers, and then sit with a trickle of sales after that. And yet preorders are a charade, and eliminating preorders fixes nothing as it means all sales are done in a single push. The only real fixes are lottery based sales (which also kind of sucks but is farier), or some sort of "upgrade offer" for existing customers instead of an open market pre-sale. That means each account gets to secure a model earlier. Or instead of a race for "launch day" take unlimited orders, and just schedule when they'll be delivered, so instead of racing to get one of the 5 million available units on launch day, everybody that wants one could place an order any time from today onward, and you just get scheduled in the queue when you should get yours....even if it's July, you're reserved in the queue.
Otherwise, to do a real preorder, they need to have preorders before production starts, so upward toward a year before launch, and they need to take non-refundable deposits for the preorder. Problem with that, then, is when Sony does a Sony and drops details on launch week about how anti-consumer and broken the promises really are, and consumers are stuck with the purchase.
TL;DR: It all sux. At least Phil is actively aware of that and working on fixing it next time. Not so optimistic in his discussions with Jim Ryan though.....nor am I comfortable about industry fixing policy "together" - it kind of makes it seem like it's not a competition but collusion.
8 seems like a small number depending on the store....though I'm not sure how many have been available per-store in past launches. Gamestop in particular is small stores, and they have a lot of stores to scatter inventory to. I know for Japanese games often Gamestops only get one or two copies of the game per store. Inventory is pretty thin there. (Might improve for XBox now though.)
PS5s was pretty scarce for in-store preorders too....and of course there are zero launch-day consoles in stores this time which makes every last unit scalper fodder.....that's kind of a mess.
The scalpers are just rediculous though. There really needs to be a concerted effort to fix that. The worst part is there's more than enough rich people that will gladly dump double the money to make little Timmy not throw a tantrum on Christmas day.
@NEStalgia@Kefka2589 Well since there is a GameSpot next to a supermarket I go to, I decided to pop in there and that one only received exactly enough for pre-sales nothing more. On top of that they were saying that the next shipment will be Black Friday.
RetiredPush Square Moderator and all around retro gamer.
@Tasuki which is another way of saying they didn't get any launch allocation at all!
I wonder if ms is doing what Sony is doing and not fulfilling brick and mortar inventory on purpose to prevent crowds? I know this site posted that Walmart would have no in store inventory...
Maybe it's everyone?
@NEStalgia It is weird store have in-store inventory but you can't just walk into the store and say I want an Xbox Series X. The only store that did that was GameStop. Best Buy, Walmart and Target you had to buy it online then if you want you can select in-store pick up and go to the get the console. However there was limited quantities on hand.
RetiredPush Square Moderator and all around retro gamer.
All very interesting. It sounds like maybe ms did the same but didn't communicate it as effectively (ironically). Or the stores oversold pre-orders and just fulfilled them with the launch inventory instead of cancelling (which probably is the right thing to do.).
It's hard to tell but it does seem like a store having launch inventory on site was an anomaly rather than expected. Walmart started beforehand that would be the case, but nobody else did.
@NEStalgia I think it was due to Sony announcing that no stores were going to have PS5 at any stores for launch day because they didn't want huge crowds because of COVID and didn't want to risk more positive cases.
I am guessing Microsoft didn't want to look like they didn't care about the publics safety and make Sony look better so at the eleventh hour changed their plans.
RetiredPush Square Moderator and all around retro gamer.
I have a SteelSeries Arctis 1 wireless headset that uses a USB dongle that my fiancé gifted me last xmas. Works great on PC and PS4, and assuming it'd be fine for XSX.
Just looking for confirmation off someone who may have experience.
@Kefka2589 fwiw, Amazon has that disclaimer often even when untrue. Probably target, too. Though I've seen stores send rediculous things with no outer box..... Stuff that dwarves consoles in insurance value....
@Tasuki american retail has been dying rapidly since the 2008 recession, and they hide it by saying retail is up! Failing to mention they're including restaurants as "retail" now and almost all the growth is restaurant and high luxury boutique. It's not that Amazon is crushing everyone... Retail is simply failing.... And online lowers overhead... And commercial real estate is a big piece if it as well. It's a mammoth bubble. Covid just helped out over the cliff at full speed, unfortunately.
Heck GameStop basically failed with the closures. They exist at all because ms is propping them up. Or Reggie's hot air floats them along.
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