Slashdot Mirror
Where In The World is the 360?
Chris Kohler's Game|Life column wonders aloud Where is the 360? Despite assurances from Microsoft that more units are making their way to retail channels, it is still effectively impossible to get ahold of one from a store. From the article: "So, uh... where's the press release for Xbox 360? The congratulatory hype over how much cash they pulled in during the first 24 hours? Xbox dot com has nothing. Were it not for that Halo 2 press release, I wouldn't be asking, but... For that matter, where's the 360 itself? It's now been over two weeks since the launch of the 360, and that nebulous ether affectionately referred to as 'the retail channel' has not seen a single additional Xbox 360 unit. How do I know? As has been well-documented here, I had a preorder reservation placed at the downtown EB Games that was originally supposed to be a launch-day unit but got bumped back to 'second shipment.'" Kotaku has commentary on this as well. I'm in a similar situation as Mr. Kohler, since Slashdot is not cool enough to receive a review console.
Aside from the DIRECT quote in the article summary, the article consists of only three more sentences.
So trust me when I say that nobody seems to have any idea when that second shipment will even arrive. It was supposed to be a week after launch, then two weeks... Where are they?
So where's the XBox 360?
/., would any of them actually risk opening it?
On EBay, which currently accounts for 10% of all 360 sales. Looks like prices from $550 to $1000. I kept wondering why the XBox was being manufactured for shortages, when M$ wasn't taking advantage of shortage pricing, but instead pricing under cost*. One article raises the speculation that the secondary market might be intentional.** Maybe M$ decided it prefers an auction economy, perhaps to dodge allegations of price gouging, which are apparently all the rage, for better or worse.
So where's the congratulatory hype?
Here's some, though we're probably not seeing a huge amount of post-release PR because they can't meet extra demand such PR would generate anyway. And they probably gave their PR department a holiday after all their pre-release work.
Or maybe they fired them after all their ads got banned from TV.
Where are our promo boxes?
The other comments have covered this pretty well. Really, if M$ sent a big heavy box in the mail to the editors of
Or maybe yours just got smashed uh... "in the mail."
*Another estimate of XBox cost/unit, from BusinessWeek.
**I don't actually think M$ planned to sell direct on Ebay to capitalize on created shortages, but it's still an interesting idea.