Xbox Series X/S and PS5 probably should've been delayed

[Bofferbrauer2]

Shinobi-san said:

I'd say both would be in a worse position? Shortages were not as bad when they launched in late 2020...potentially this had an impact on the price and maybe they have somewhat locked in their price with suppliers (just guessing here).

Luanching end of 2021 would definitely mean higher cost of hardware, and I doubt they would be able to produce anything significantly faster.

Games wise I think Sony are okay, im not a fan with their choice of games to produce (Demons Souls remake, Miles Morales, Sackboy) but the games were there. MS might have benefitted from a year delay with regards to games, but it seems like they still wont have anything meaningful in 2021...let alone 2020. So that would have been an even longer delay if the idea was to wait for big exclusives.

Gamepass and performance improvements (backward compat and system) seems to be the main selling point of Series X and its still sold relative well. Also releasing last year lines up perfectly with the Xbox strategy - get as many people on gamepass as possible.

Just what I wanted to point out. But it could be even worse.

Since the fabs where the chips are produced are all running at full capacity, they deliver to their clients in a "first come, first served" manner. This is why cars have the shortages now, they dropped their microchip orders and found themselves now suddenly pushed to the back of the line. If the consoles would have released later, a similar scenario would have happened for them, too. After all, they couldn't just start production at the original date and continue producing at current speed until now - where would they put all those consoles? And any pause, any delay or any volume reduction would have stuck and be very hard to reverse again until the chip crunch is over.