Slashdot Mirror
Walk-Ins Get 360 In April?
IGN has a piece talking to retail stores across the country about the upcoming 360 launch, and it doesn't look good. From the article: "According to retailers in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Miami and Houston, there will be mass shortage of Xbox 360 units on the targeted launch date of November 22. IGN contacted dozens of stores around the country, including Gamestop, EB Games, Electronics Boutique, Target and Walmart. One short-tempered clerk at a Gamestop in New York estimated that Xbox 360 units will not be available for walk-in customers until April. That's right, April."
Not enough consoles to keep up with demand...check
Lie and say your doing it on purpose, only shipping a certain amount to each business...check
Give developers only 3 months to work on finished dev kits..check
Have most of the major launch titles pushed back out of the launch list...check
Have most of your games look hardly next gen on a normal tv...check
Have a game that cannot even reach 30fps at 720p and must upscale...check
Make ebgames/gamestop screw over most of your fans...check
Make your new incredibly powerfull console look like a rush job...priceless
Why? A couple of months *is* a brief period. It does no good to simply have the scarcity last only a few weeks. You need the long delay to make the angst palpable. And then they'll announce "Ooh, we're getting new shipments in we weren't expecting!" as the idiots slaver hungrily at the door each week.
I have no doubt this is still all artificial.
Could this be any more blatant a puff?
:)
Some tousled corporate parasite is right now celebrating his ability to generate authentic grassroots excitement in a tailored halo demographic that combines youthshare with techster credibility and so cements the brand in the minds of 20something pre-life-crisis shoppers as both a technology leader and a style marker.
What they don't realise is that this is slashdot on a saturday night and all he's getting is six year old kernel hackers and grumpy old toads like me, who are not only incapable of getting excited about yet another sucker gadget, they're also the least likely consumer role models in the world.
They can make as many xboxes as they want, and they will.
I hope he trips over the coffee table and gets a rolled up 20 lodged in his brain
One short-tempered clerk at a Gamestop in New York estimated that Xbox 360 units will not be available for walk-in customers until April. That's right, April.
Oh, well, if a grumpy clerk at Gamestop says it, IT MUST BE TRUE!!!!!
Comment of the year
xboxmarketing.slashdot.org
I'm not so sure this is artificial scarcity anymore. It's one thing to create a buzz with a brief period of scarcity. It's another thing to extend it so long that you eat up all of your much touted lead time on the competition.
And it's another still to rely on clerks at GameStop for reliable information.
Seriously, I don't get this. Do you rely on the cashier at Wal-Mart for information on your favorite director's next film or for the latest info on HD technology? Why are people constantly quoting counter clerks at game stores for industry info? These guys know nothing. It's a truly bizarre phenomenon - every time I walk into a game store I see half a dozen people literally hovering over the counter talking to the clerks about games, then I'll bet it's those same people who hit up sites like this with the "info" they've gleaned. To me, this carries no more weight than asking any random person on the street the same questions and then posting their answers.
These guys make minimum wage to ring up your purchases. That's all they do. They do not have industry "contacts", they do not talk to developers or publishers or manufacturers. They ring up purchases and they vacuum the store at closing time. That's what they're paid to do and that's the extent of their real knowledge. Anything else you get from them is, at best, something they've read in a magazine - which is the same thing you could do yourself.
I kinda get the feeling that both the clerks themselves and the guys who chat them up for info to post on the net actually like feeling like they have this little "shadow" game industry unto themselves. They like starting rumors; they don't even want real info. A couple years ago I actually worked for a publisher and I'd go into the GameStop near my company all the time, often with my company colors on (we had jackets with our company name on them). Not that I'd tell anyone anything if they asked, but not a single person ever even tried getting info from me, even if they were talking to the counter clerk about my company's games with me standing right next to them! The clerks themselves must have known who we were (a lot of us frequented this GameStop, and they knew we were in the neighborhood), but not a single one of them ever tried to pump us for info either. It was kind of funny, but it definitely made me think that real info is not even what these guys want - juicy info is what they want, whether or not it's true. Truth is not really on their radar, and that's most likely the case with this Xbox 360 rumor just as it is with everything else.
Just in time for my income tax rebate!
Make love, not reality television.
One short-tempered clerk at a Gamestop in New York estimated that Xbox 360 units will not be available for walk-in customers until April
I've had folks at GameStop tell me that the PS3 might still make s "surprise" arrival by the end of this year. I am certain they all have their finger on the pulse of gaming.....
http://www.tomandemily.com
There's another reason to not believe game store employees: in the past, they have been instructed to lie to the customers about availability. I have friends who worked at various video game stores, and when a hot new item finally hit the market, they were supposed to tell the customer that there's only one or two left even if there was a whole pallete of PS2s, Wavebirds or whatever left. They almost never ran out of stock on release day or even the first week on highly anticipated releases.
The obvious benefits to the store for doing this are 1)it prevents the customer for shopping around. Not so much that prices are different, but many game stores have required bundles on release and it is the bundle where they really make their overhead. 2)Customers are more likely to pre-order in the future if they think the video game manufacturors don't really supply the full demand at launch.
Now it is possible that this is simply a regional thing. I live in the Midwest, so I can see how in other markets they do actually sell out. The larger markets wouldn't have a reason to lie about availability if they honestly do sell every unit they get. It is also possible that these friends of mine were lying, spreading a myth similar to cow tipping, but I would find it odd that people who were employed by all the major video game stores would have the same story. It is also possible that lying to the customer is now forbidden rather than encouraged (I always heard the lying was ordered from on high) but I don't really see this happening as that means their main competition is now Wal-Mart.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
You must be on the inside! How did you find out that was when Halo 3 would be released?
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!