Friday, November 04, 2005

Ho Ho Ho, says Bill

In a shock "billionaire tries to make more money" scandal, it appears that the US launch day stock of the XBOX360 will be limited to meagre amounts per store. As detailled over at the XBOX Forums already, stock for some major retail stores in the US like WalMart will only be able to sell between 10-50 units on a first come first serve basis with only one purchase per person. The dedicated gamer outlets like Electonics Boutique may only receive 16 units per store which will piss off the 60 odd people who have already pre-ordered - over 30 of which were promised a console. Some other stores worldwide have also been told that they must sell out on the launch date and that they must sell at least two games per console. The spin on this is possibly two fold.
  • Has Microsoft had issues making the consoles in time for the launch date? If so then the low stock estimates could be valid.
  • However, predicting a sell out on launch date, creating a high demand for the "must have" next gen console could also work in their favour, creating a shopping frenzy. Hell, they are already on eBay for over £300!
What ever the reason, if I don't get one on December the 25th... i will stamp my feet and cry. Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

10 comments:

Loz said...

it sounds to me like they're just building the hype - making everyone think "oh shit i'm going to miss out, i must step over my own grandmother to get one as soon as humanly possible" when they probably won't have any problems with supplying the consoles at all.

eevil, like the fru-its of the dev-il.

Tao said...

I would step over your grandmother to get one too!

Anonymous said...

They all do it - PS2 / PSP / DS / DC were all massively under supplied at launch. It's a standard way of hyping cool gadgetry. Still evil though.

Personally I'll be stamping my feet on December 2nd if I don't get one.

I wonder why the world is only reporting this now - we covered it weeks ago after Microsoft started the 'short supply' hype.

Ghone said...

But the big question is - r u going to mod it?

Anonymous said...

No is the small answer from me. :)

I want to be able to play on Live - until a foolproof stealth mod comes out it'd be too risky. Anyway Bill says this one will be hack proof. ;)

I am planning on re-hacking my old Xbox as soon as I get my new one to turn it into a full fledged media centre job though.

Tao said...

"To mod - or not to mod".

Ghone: "Mod" would be my choice, but i too want to play on Live - and kick your ass (baby, yeahhhh!).

mmChronic: I know you guys covered it, like, ages ago.. but the hype around the console is reaching fever pitch!

I all honesty - I can't afford one this year. Anyway, if I wait a little longer I will probably get a better bundle at some point next year.

I rarely play my current Modded XBOX at the moment (and even less since "obtaining" World Masters Poker for my GBA last night).

My "fantasy £300" would be hard split on the choice of a Mac Mini or an XBOX 360... Or half a new PC or something...

Ghone said...

Any news to share on the latest PSP developments? I read somewhere that you could now get a util to easily transfer your mp3 files.

Anonymous said...

PSPs play MP3s out of the box - no hacking / utils required. As for transferring them to PSP in 1st place you connect the PSP via USB2 to your PC and you just drag and drop your mp3 / video / whatever files.

I've never used it as an mp3 player - my 1Gb memory stick is too small to hold a decent a collection of music and I'd rather have it filled with SNES games (or something) anyway. :)

Tao said...

Forgive him, its just his way of trying to keep me on a "technology blog" path.

There is lots of utils out there for transferring MP3s to a PSP and Sony have just released a new tool to so the same.

I expect it won't be as good as the other 3rd party apps though...

Anonymous said...

I truly don't understand. Why are there apps to do this? They aren't needed. Plug PSP in to PC, drag mp3 files to PSP memstick (opened as a window on your desktop), play.

I have seen apps that are said to rip a CD to PSP format - but ALL they are doing is encoding the files into standard mp3 format. I'm off to write a Special PSP Music Encode / Transfer utilty. And I think I'll call it LAME.