At this point, if you haven’t already scored a pre-order, your chances of getting a next-gen console at launch is pretty much nil, but what about later this year? It seems likely the PS5 will remain in very short supply, but what about the Xbox Series X and S? Well, you probably shouldn’t get your hopes up on that front either. During an interview on the most recent episode of the Dropped Frames podcast, Xbox boss Phil Spencer laid out the Xbox Series X/S stock situation for the next few months.
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 that supply, and I’ll apologize in advance for that. […] And I think we’re going to live in that world for a few months — a lot more demand that we have supply. On the supply-chain side, it’s “What can we do to get more inventory?”
Spencer realizes the Xbox Series X/S pre-order situation was frustrating for some, even if it was slightly more organized than the PS5 pre-order free-for-all. Overall, Spencer believes something has to change…
You have these pre-orders, and you want it to be a positive event, and you want it to be a positive event for the community, and obviously, it’s hard. We sell out in a couple hours, and we think, “Well, what good was that?” We end up with more frustrated people. I think, as an industry, we’re going to have to rethink that in some ways, because of the bots and everything else. It’s not a great situation. We’ve been doing debriefs with all of our retailers, asking “Hey, are there things we can do to make this better?”
The amount of angst I got from people…who are really wanting to get into Xbox, and this was their opportunity. And we’re going to build, from day one, every week there’s more and more consoles coming in. But I don’t like to have so many people disappointed, so that’s something we’ve got to think about.
Definitely agree with Spencer here. I don’t know what the better plan for launching a new console is, but there’s got to be something better than the pre-order insanity we saw this generation.
If you’re lucky enough to have actually snagged a pre-order, the Xbox Series X and S launch on November 12.
