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.

Comments

Conspiracy Theories

[RoadDoggFL]

Ok, so if the 360's second shipment slips past Christmas will all of the conspiracy theories that claim the shortages were intentional finally go away?

I'm not so sure who to believe but missing Christmas would be taking the whole "artificial shortage to increase demand" thing a bit too far and into the realm of stupidy (no, I'm not putting that past Microsoft, I'm just saying that it REALLY wouldn't make sense then).

Re:Conspiracy Theories

[hal2814]

I agree with you. However, it's still a long way to Christmas and despite what most people think, Black Friday is not as busy a shopping day (in terms of sales dollars) as some of the days right before Christmas. MS could still be possibly planning to end an artificially-created shortage during that time to get the most hype per shopping dollar, but that could just be my tinfoil hat talking.