I have never preordered software. It seems to me if they expect 2 million in sales the first week they can print 2million copies of the game. Supply is normaly enough to cover the demand. Now if your one interested in the limited or legondary edition that is a diffrent story.

My plan is to goto best buy or walmartm or even if need be one the other 10 major retailors in my area. I expect to be able to just buy a normal copy the day or next day of release.

Who knows, I may eat my words.

Actually I commute forty minutes to work, and there are a few boutique stores forty minutes from where I live. The problem lies in the fact that they are opposite directions with my home in the middle. Fortunately I work the second shift so will get off just a couple hours before the launch.

Obviously the Walmart is much closer to where I work then the specialty stores. Were I to get off work I would have a eighty minute drive to go buy a game. Doable but hardly desirable. Then a forty minute drive back to my home. All told in one day if I worked I would end up driving for almost three hours. I try to avoid spending that much time in a car.

Life is grand in rural America. Obviously I have the option, but I would hate to have to reorganize my life to this kind of extreme. I hope the Walmart will be taking preorders. That would save me a lot of time and money. Otherwise I am looking at calling off work or making one hell of a late night dash to get myself near the back of a line.

Can anyone confirm if WalMart does indeed take preorders?

I don't think you will have an issue getting one out of stock on the shelf day one from Wal-Mart. I do know that Target does preorders. Do you have one near you?

Also, if you don't mind paying 10 bucks for overnight shipping, gamestop.com will ship it to you the day before so that you actually will receive it on release day...  

If H3 sells out everywhere on release day, I'll eat my hat. MS is going to ship enough of those the week before release to wallpaper a football stadium.

Rumor has it that Halo 3 went gold a couple days ago, meaning that they have a ton of time for production.

I'm sure everything has been done (cases, sleeves, instruction booklets) for quite some time. Three weeks is plenty of time to print and burn discs for the game.

From my understanding the only copy that should be hard to get is the Legendary Edition.

I have no idea how many preorders (never asked) but all i know is, they moved the party from the store in town because of lack of space.

And you heard me right, midnight party on 25th

Ill be there camping out for it on the 24th.

The Legendary and CE's are going to be hard to find day-1 because there's a limited printing of both. I know one or the other is limited to *just* 500,000 copies.

I overheard a GS/EB employee (when I was put on "hold" to ask about Blue Dragon coming in) telling a person that if they want Halo3, that they have to pre-order. He then stated that they have over 500 preorders at this little rinky-dink EB/GS (Again, at this one, they had 20 preorders for Forza, and around 80 for Oblivion for X360 and PC).

There are 2 reasons they are stressing preorders:

#1. It makes them far more money - Think about it, if you give them $5 for a pre-order, your investing that cash into them at a 0% APY. Extra profit for them.

#2. MS really doesn't know the demand outside of pre-orders. Also, there's no way to really solidify where the extra non-PO copies are going to go. I have a feeling that each store will probably get around 20-30 non-preorder copies per store. That's ALOT for a normal game (20-30 per general store would be probably around 200,000-300,000 unsold units).

In order for MS to properly saturate the market, it'd have to undertake somewhere around 750 copies PER STORE on AVERAGE. That's vastly too many units. Why? Imagine what would happen to Halo3 if it sold beyond 1,000 units at a store that otherwise wouldnt of sold much, whilst another store (a big one, lets say) gets 750 copies and sells 50 on launch day. That would be a disaster for the distribution centers since they would have tens of thousands of USD $ products lying around, taking weeks to be transfered to stores that need them.

So it's better for them to not have too many non-preordered copies (again, in the 200,000-500,000 area) in stores, with another 500,000-1,000,000 in distribution centers waiting to ship more units to the store as demand requires.

The videogame market is unique in this aspect of sales, as there really isn't a market out there that has the same issue of uber-first week sales, and massive shortages.


And finally....If you were the distributors of Halo3, what would you rather do: buy 100,000 copies that are already paid for at $60 each (on average, wholesale), or buy 250,000 copies with half of them unsold - That'd be a $9,000,000 purchase of unsold goods. And with any game, you never know if it's going to sell or not (think ET).



I think MS, EB/GS, and the other places are doing the right thing by stressing preorders. Lets just hope that whomever goes out there to buy a non-PO copy finds one.

What I'm REALLY wondering is: if Halo3 sells 2m to 3m units first week, where will Week 2 be?