Well, the good part about the shortages is that the sales will not be just one huge spike but will be more evenly distributed.

If there are significant shortages, right before Tales of Vesperia release, that' is some seriously poor planning (and only 7k bundles? wtf are they thinking... they shoulda bumped that to 20k)

360 on their way to 1 million in Japan by.... 2011 maybe?

 Anecdotal evidence, fuel for fools. kthksbye

I find that hard to believe. There must've been 360s sitting on shelves for months over there in Japan. They weren't exactly sold out every week.

It could be true you know, if Microsoft expected less sales than they've been getting their shipments might just have been too low.

It's not like MS know exactly how much they will be selling in advance, nor do they decide on shipments at the very last moment. Couple this with the known fact that Xbox 360 sales in Japan are not too high and a tendency for stores and manufacturers alike to strive for an inventory that is as low as possible even slow selling product can run out if demand surges.

And yes, selling nearly twice what you usually do does count as a surge in demand - even if the figures are not at Wii levels.

(As example: suppose Microsoft counted on selling 2,000-3,000 Xbox 360's a week for the comming months. Now sales are more like 4,000-5,000 Xbox 360's a week, so if they planned for a month or so of stock availability they'd have run out in 2 weeks instead and you'd get a shortage - even though they've not sold a gazillion of them)

i can see it its not that far out of left field, they have been selling like crap so they probably figured they wouldn't need to have that many there and that would happen to be the week when demand jumped up

Thank you Tales of Vesperia!

I just bought one in Japan. I'm part of the shortage problem.

They probably never thought the X360 would sell over 3000 per week during the year in non holiday periods. 10000 X360's sold per week during a holiday period is when the X360 sales peak in Japan.