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shikamaru317 on 11 April 2023
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gtotheunit91 said:
Zippy6 said:

So sales in the UK dropped even further in March and down 18% YoY for the year so far and the stock situation is much worse in the USA than the UK so I dread to think what March is going to look like once the NPD drops. Series X is available on Amazon UK but you have to buy it bundled with Forza. Meanwhile the stock issues in USA have continued well into April. Frankly ridiculous now. This is clearly not a short-term problem and I still don't know what that problem is.

That's definitely the perception taking hold. Even if Microsoft was holding onto Series X consoles for Starfield's launch or even adding more xCloud servers, there shouldn't be a reason why stock has been suffering for this long.....

Yeah, something seems majorly off. TSMC, the semiconductor company that both Sony and Xbox use, is far less overworked now than they were a year ago, they finally worked through alot of the years long backlog that Covid caused, the fact that Sony's production issues have completely disappeared prove this. I can really only think of 2 scenarios here to explain why Xbox production numbers are down:

  1. Xbox has been putting like 100-150k Series X chipsets per week since the beginning of the year into a mixture of Xbox Cloud gaming server blades, Diablo 4 bundles, and Starfield bundles. If this is what is happening than they are either a. way overestimating anticipated future demand for Xbox Cloud gaming while future proofing their server capacity, or b. they hope to be able to sell like 800k Diablo 4 bundles over the summer and 3m+ Starfield bundles between September and the end of 2023 (in addition to standard Series X SKU's and possibly a 2nd Holiday bundle if they have some other big 3rd party marketing deal or a Forza bundle planned for the Holiday or something). 
  2. Xbox is purposefully sabotaging their own production numbers in an attempt to look more pitiful before the regulators. "Look how badly Sony is beating us, we need ABK or else big bad Sony will put us out of business and have a complete monopoly over the high end console market". If this is the case, it is completely unnecessary, I doubt such an argument would sway most of they regulators in the slightest and it seems like this deal is going through regardless, they would only be hurting themselves by sabotaging themselves in 2023, especially since even if the ABK deal is approved Xbox will get few or no exclusives out of it that can boost Series S|X sales later in the generation in order to compensate for their lackluster self-sabotaged 2023. Hopefully this is not what happened, they'd be doing both themselves and their loyal fans a disservice by doing something like this. 

I really hope we are looking at scenario 1 here, would be great to have tons of Diablo bundles and Starfield bundles available later this year.

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 11 April 2023