In what comes as a surprise to noone at this point, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer has confirmed that supply will be constrained for the Xbox this holiday season meaning demand will exceed supply in what the executive says may be months. The comments come after a recent podcast appearance for Spencer where he sat down with the Dropped Frames crew to discuss the stock situation for the Xbox Series X/S. (via Neogaf)
Like everything else, bots have put the supply of Xboxes low for launch
“All of our day-one units are at retailers, or very close to that. We’ve built all of our day one allocations. We know what our supply will look like, basically for the rest of the year. We’re going to have more demand than supply, and I’ll apologize in advance for that,” says Spencer who goes on to say that “I think we’re going to live in that world for a few months — a lot more demand than we have supply.”
Spencer’s comments come on the heels of similar comments by Sony’s Jim Ryan, signaling that both the PlayStation and the Xbox are going to be hard to find this holiday. On the podcast, Spencer did acknowledge that the pre-order situations have been a bit of a mess, going as far as to say that maybe these things need to be rethought so that it’s an enjoyable experience where bots don’t suck up all the supply.
The fourth quarter should have been a great one for gamers. New graphics cards for PC gamers and new consoles for the pleebs, but high resell prices and sophisticated bot programs that run proxies and multiple credit cards have managed to suck up a lot of the supply for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, as well as just about every graphics card Nvidia and partners have put out.
Spencer wants to make this more enjoyable for the true fans, but that’s not going to fix that many won’t be able to get the new Xbox without having to pay re-sell prices. The bright side is that Spencer says Microsoft is going to be building a lot of Xbox consoles. “We’re going to build,” says Spencer. “From day one, every week there’s more and more consoles coming in. I don’t like to have so many people disappointed.”
The Xbox Series X/S are set to launch on November 10th.
