i just went to amazon.ca and you can "pre order" an xbox one that comes out on the 20th...

i think they are just selling them ahead of time and don't have them in stock (other than whats already sold).

bestbuy.ca has it in stock...so yes i would say demand has dropped below the supply for the xbox one overall

Some of the best indies can fit in that category, but it's a minority. I guess what Tornado meant was that also the big industry will have to adopt more the model of dev prices not excessive and under control to be able to offer a wide mid priced range on a regular basis, not just to satisfy emerging markets, but also because the "triple A" model costs is sustainable only for a minority of titles. Indies can fill the gap very often, but for their nature not completely and not on a regular basis, a true indie is ready when it wants and/or when it can. This "missing link" should ideally unite the pros of indies and organized big publishers and devs without the worst cons of triple A, skyrocketing costs and rapacious attitude towards users.
Anyway, incentive programs for indies can help a lot, and like in the past, many of the nimblest outsiders will be former indies that grew up, but this doesn't change the fact that triple A model spreading beyond where it's justifiable is putting the industry in danger, a big crash would shrink the overall market and growing indies would take years to fill the void. It would surely be refreshing, but I fear existing console manufacturers would suffer badly (royalties are a big part of console producers revenue and even bigger of their profits).

but u are wrong about the minority part. Indies are rapidly growing and are the only hope for the middleground. Sony's 1st party are actually helping indies so I think it is the best model for inbetween mobile and aaa. Games like everyone's gone to the rapture, rime, shadow of the beast, h-hour, and hohokum are just the first taste to the future of what I'm talking about.

Indies good enough (and well managed and ambitious enough) for the role we're talking about will always be a minority, the majority of indies remains forever small. This doesn't deny that such minority can become big, and after previous videogame industry crashes, emerging indies became big enough to eventually fill a good part of the space left vacant. But the industry now is a lot bigger, many more indies will need to grow to fill the empty space, and should the big industry suffer from a large crash, indies couldn't fill it all and they would leave a lot of empty space unfilled: they'd expand a lot, here I'm not tryng to deny your claim about their capacity to do it, but they'd take years to fill all that empty space, and in the meantime the industry would stay shrunk compared to the situation before the crash. The more indies will fill the mid-range market, the better, but to avoid a temporary but big decline, should things worsen, it's necessary that the big industry too start filling that space and save itself in the process.

Definitely so if you look at Amazon US.  Also, I just noticed that they are now taking preorders for the PS4, since they are getting a shipment on the 10th. 

Edit:  Well, god damn.  In the time it took me to type this message, they have already sold out of their Jan 10th shipment.

People stopped paying $600 for the PS3 because it simply didn't offer enough value at that price relative to the amount of content available at the time to all but a select, smaller group of consumers. It really doesn't have anything to do with people being smarter with their money today. You could argue that everyone is a lot poorer than they were before 2008, but even then, that's not exactly sound logic. 

The $400 retail price of the PS4 is very reasonable, even with the limited launch window content and features. It also falls in line quite reasonably with the BoM cost, which is quite modest relative to the 7th gen consoles initially. 

Consumer logic is a funny thing, but $100 does make quite a difference in the minds of most.

So much for that big shipment. Huh. 

Amazon should probably stop taking backlog orders. It's a convenience and a nice service for people who like to plan ahead, but it could potentially make it difficult to purchase one through Amazon if demand continues to outstrip supply and their backlog of unfilled orders grows.

I disagree that indie games will be enough. What incentive would there be for someone of only a moderate income in a developing country to buy a PS4 for example if they cannot afford retail games? First of all, indie games are most frequently digital distribution which is useless in developing markets. India, Malasia, Thailand, Philippines; these nations need offline, physical, affordable software if they're going to be truly incentivised to join the gaming hobby.

In short what we need are budget titles, like I said before. Something in between the $<10 indie/mobile games, and the $60 Triple A with a further $30-60 in DLC, map packs, and pre-order special edition crap. No-one will buy a PS4 to play just Resogun, it may be good but it's not that good. No-one will buy a PS4 just to play cheap indie games which could easily run on previous hardware. They want games with a smaller, tighter, niche focus. Games that release at around the $25 mark with intentions on selling 500,000 copies at a profit. Yes this means low budget. These games used to exist though, and they where good, but they all got snatched up and turned into high end AAA franchises. The Hitman series, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series, Metro 2033, even Demon's Souls. These where all budget releases. Look now, Hitman: Absolution, Metro: Last Light, Dark Souls 2... they're high budget AAA games now. Back when the Tomb Raider reboot came out and Squeenix where complaining that it had disappointing sales and they needed over 6m sales to break even, I was genuinely angry. Why did they waste so much money? When Dark Souls topped 1m sales, they where celebrating, why? Because they didn't have an over-inflated budget. One thing they did have though was a triple A price tag. That seems disingenuous to me.

I'm a normal ordinary guy in the UK. For me, a brand new release comes in at £55, that's $92 USA. I cannot afford that. I don't buy games new any more. I used to, back when the PS2 and original Xbox had budget releases at £19.99, and standard releases at £34.99. Not any more. If games continue to increase in price such that the only games we can afford to buy new are the indie games, this industry will nose dive and no amount of hardware sales for the PS4 will save it. What good is a decent userbase if people can only afford 2-3 games per year; all the developers will go bankrupt... oh wait, is that THQ and Atari over there... perhaps it's already too late...

They got some more now, but damn they are selling quick.

56@12:26
48@12:27
41@12:28

Will be sold out in a few minutes.  Hurry if you want one!

Edit: well it looks like Amazon US may be adding more preorders every 15 minutes, and they're selling like hotcakes.  Check it out.  This is making the PS4 go to #1.

56@12:26
48@12:27
41@12:28
92@12:30 <- more stock
79@12:32
67@12:34
58@12:36
45@12:38
33@12:40
21@12:42
91@12:45 <- more stock
75@12:46

Were the numbers adjusted or is everyone really bad at math ? lol