Console Shortages

[damonrpayne]

The Wii and the PS3 are impossible to get right now. Rewind a year, so was the XBox 360, and the PS2 and the Xbox before that.

What is the point of launching to HUGE customer demand with infinitesimal numbers of units, then spending marketing dollars on top of that? What is the point of making the launch for the holidays when all you have to offer is a small quantity of units that you would have sold out of anyway?

I'm batting around the idea that its done on purpose. Think about it: you have a new console, possibly a new online service, they are almost certainly going to have some bugs at first despite all your testing efforts. Why not produce only a limited # of consoles so that any errors are caught and fixed in 200,000 consoles instead of 2,000,000 consoles. The first people to buy are essentially un-paid beta testers. By releasing in such limited quantities, you are also being assured that only the people who want your product very, very badly are going to get it. No one is going to casually walk in off the street and buy your new console on a whim and be upset. The guy who camped out in front of best buy to get his new console isn't going to say "screw it" and take it back if it overheats or has some quirks.

Thoughts?

[Guest " "]

" The guy who camped out in front of best buy to get his new console isn't going to say "screw it" and take it back if it overheats or has some quirks."

A lot of these wind up on ebay.

[erickoegle]

The day of the release of the PS3, I checked Ebay and saw ~35,000 not including the presales that went before. That is about 10% of the total US launch if I am not mistaken. I think it is funny how the presales on Ebay were going for more than 3K now you can get a premium for about 800$.

[dblue]

I have thought about this also, but I have come to the conclusion that the shortages are not planned...the company would make much more money for the fiscal year (and sell many more consoles, which is their immediate goal) if they had the supply to meet the demand.

Problem is, they never will. WIth the consoles all being totally custom pieces of hardware (with totally custom chips and chipsets), it will always be impossible to meet demand. In any chip-making manufacturing process, the process is constantly refined until you have under X percentage of 'bad' chips. When the process is first implemented, even big manufacturers (lke Intel and AMD) are lucky to hit 70% efficiency, which means 30% of their chips are trashed as soon as they come off of the assembly line. Plug this into the console equation, where the hardware specs are 'fixed', and the window for launch with the hardware still being relavent is small, and you see that they have a very small window to announce, produce, and refine their manufacturing process, always resulting in not enough supply to meet the launch demand. It was the same way with SNES, N64, Gamecube, PS2, and so on.

It is compounded this time because Sony shoehorned a blueray drive into the PS3 that they admitted having major issues manufacturing.

The Wii, by contrast, is not that hard to get. Steady shipments are coming in, because they opted for a proven chipset (basically an overclocked Gamecube). Their manufacturing efficiency is high and their cost is low (they're the only of the 3 companies making any profit on the actual hardware, sony is losing about $300 per console now and MS is losing about $100...MS lost about 6 billion total on the whole XBOX outing since the beginning...they don't care they want to get into the market).

My 2 cents.

[Jay481985]

they make up for it in the games and licensing. BTW Microsoft's office division probably makes 6 billion in a month.

Also sony yes can be buggy but atleast the software can be updated online now.