@SplooshDmg I give TotalTech a year and a half at best. Honestly who is buying that other than people forced into it for consoles? I got the email announcing it in July or whatever and honestly sat there laughing, reading it to people as a joke. It's just such a terribad service at a terribad price. For $200 year a get free shipping (which you get anyway on most products) and tech support, basically. And extended warranties automatically. Who buys $200/yr worth of electronics extended warranties and tech support? I kinda liked Best Buy in the GCU days, but they've become really weird and predatory. Again, they make GameStop look good now. I got my PS5's at Best Buy at launch, and got lucky, but "the new GameStop" is a terrible crown to award. That was when they shipped them and didn't charge you $200 for the right to see out of stock messages. And it took about 6 hours of working their broken site both on mobile and on PC simultaneously to get a working cart.
I also think MS blundered with All Access for these consoles. It's a cool program but should only be run when they have stable inventory, and should probably only run direct from MS. These retailers are using it as scalper prevention for online orders now, even when they have no inventory, running credit checks for people they have no intention of selling a product to, which actually ruins your chances of applying for it when they do have inventory, because you're not supposed to run 50 hard queries a month trying to open the same line of credit over and over again at 5 different retailers through the same bank. The whole concept of AA is very misguided on scarce items, and MS should take the blame for that blunder, really.
I had an issue with Walmart with the Switch OLEDs in July. I got in, they had them listed, sold out everywhere else. Placed an order, success, and then it came back and said credit verification declined the order as suspicious activity. It was Paypal. Weird. Tried again. Success! Then verification declined as suspicious. Same Paypal/account I used with them to order the X back a year ago. Again. Same issue. Paypal is putting holds on my card for each of these...it's getting through. How is it rejected? So I had to contact them. Of course it's India and I can decipher one out of every 12 words. They needed to transfer me. I got someone in the US! Aaaaand, they apparently transferred me to Grocery. Grocery had to transfer me back to .com. Which...sent me back to India. I could understand 8 out of every 12 words this time. Better at least.
She keeps telling me the bank rejected my card. It's Paypal. She keeps telling me but the bank rejected the Paypal transaction. I keep telling her but I see the holds on the bank's account. It made it to the bank. It's there, nobody rejected anything. And she keeps telling me the same thing, because I can't understand anything she says and she can't understand anything I say making the whole conversation pointless. I kept interrogating her on why it happened, I made out something about after the first time the account was flagged (then why could I keep placing orders?) and that credit will clear the account. I tried to get verification that I won't have that problem in the future. Who knows. I kept interrogating (as she kept trying to get me off the call) as to why exactly that happened. The answer she basically went with and I kept confirming in so many words was "because I tried to order an OLED switch that flagged the account". "Yes, we recommend you shop in the store for that item." "But I just want to make sure, you're saying trying to buy that particular product flags accounts as fraud" "Yes, we recommend you shop in the store for that item." We went through that dance about 20 times before I finally gave up.
Meanwhile like 12 hours later walmart still had Switch OLED for sale while everyone else sold out in 4 minutes. ............... How many accounts did they fraud flag trying to buy that?? Freaking mess.
And a year later, Series X is even worse!
Amazon was first, they've tied high demand items to Prime members for years. They did it with OG Switch, I know they've done it for phones a lot. They do it for non-tech things that are in-demand as well. Probably 8 years or so at least. Of course virtually everyone has a Prime membership so it's not really useful or problematic. GameStop did it first this time, and that was low, but a $35/yr specialty store membership that gives you monthly $5 coupons, a print magazine subscription, and various other perks is a different game entirely to these other services. That's more of a "members club" than a whole premium subscription thing these other stores are doing. At least with GS you get a small "ordering privilege deposit" and they pay you back for it in coupons. Best Buy is straight up robbing you almost half the price of the product you're trying to buy. I'd legit rather they just say "Series X prices are set at $1000 due to supply & demand and investor interest. #dealwithit." That's at least honest.
I really agree with you with the inconsistency. Best Buy is the worst with that (they were a year ago too) the terms and requirements of where it's available, whether delivery was available, etc would change literally every few minutes. BB has always been bad. Ohhh boy I have a long story about their large appliance department, their website, their internal inventory (fun fact, their internal inventory system is even worse than their online one! They honestly have no idea what they have in inventory! Someone has to check, physically, in the distro center, because they just know the database is usually wrong!) I swore I'd never do business with BB again. GCU pulled me back in as a customer.
I love how TotalTech is abbreviated as TT - the fail comes built in! Apparently the "geek squad" does not, in fact, internet, otherwise somebody would have pointed out that little PR problem. Pretty sure the "geek squad' is a bunch of Harvard MBAs formerly from Colgate-Palmolive.
I actually hate signature required. it's the most idiotic policy ever. Yeah porch pirates are a thing, but you're never there when they deliver it ,and even if you are, they don't show up. It's this stressful game of cat and mouse and you can't win without destroying your life. I generally refuse to buy anywhere that requires signatures except under very rare circumstances. I get it for high demand/value goods, but it also needs a way, way better system. I know I'm going ot have to deal with it with the repaired unit, and I'm not at all happy about that. Probably should have called a local repair shop.
We're a year in, is this "early adopters" still? Yeah, I may get an S. Sadly I have to buy another controller with it, which is annoying. I might end up just getting the bundle for $500 with another Elite 2. Then I'm back up to X price for an S, but I get a spare Elite 2, which frankly I absolutely adore that controller and will be heartbroken when it drifts. Another white/blue/red controller feels like a waste. Could just buy a scalped X...but...$900 just isn't sitting well. And I'm afraid to hesitate and think about it because then the chance is gone. I have my repairable X and one (for now) non broken X in the house...but...what when those break out of warranty? I'm convinced they'll all break like RROD now.
I swore I'd never preorder another console, but looking at how things go post-launch, it's less bad at preorder than after. It takkes, what, 3 years before a console becomes readily available? Out of a 7 year life cycle?
IDK what happens to this gen. We haven't even started next gen, everything is tied to the old consoles because that's what most people have still. Either this becomes a 10, 12 year generation instead of 7 because it won't really start until year 3 or 4, (mid gen bump!), or this goes down as a weird abandoned generation that we'll already be launching into the next generation hype before this one even really starts, and there will never really be definitive "9th gen" games, it'll all be "late 8th gen, and early 10th gen cross-gen games" where 9th gen either acted as 8th gen Pro+ consoles, or acted as weak budget pre-10th gen consoles.
@SplooshDmg To compare to last time we probably can only look at Sony. Nobody WANTED an Xbox Done, so supply quantity was about as relevant as WiiU. But for PS4, yeah, they're making more than last time, but that data doesn't tell us per-region how much is available. They're in more countries. 3rd world countries now have more elite tier people that can afford the equivalent of a $20,000 console in their local currency because they oppress the population around them more efficiently and take Western money. They're now selling in China. They couldn't do that before. 1bn more people in the market. Even if they made half as many units available in US and EU than last time, they could still be making 4x more and selling out....but we're fighting over fewer units available to us.
I'm still uncertain if demand for these consoles is suddenly "OMG the console market in the US is now 5x bigger than it was 7 years ago and everybody's a gamer now" or how much of this is still the toilet paper/flour/yeast FOMO phenomenon. People didn't need 10x more toilet paper than they normally use in 2020, they just wanted to have an endless supply on hand because someone else might get it before them if they need it against a backdrop where it was hard to get. Because everybody knows everybody wants a PS5X, everybody needs to run and buy a PS5X right now because if they want a PS5X they can't get one later. I still believe the scarcity is a significant sales driver, and if they were readily available sales would be lower. I think a lot of people are buying them for FOMO and then shelving them because they don't really want one any more than they wanted a PS4 they didn't buy. Same as Wii. There's definitely growth in the market, and Fortnite and the like certainly brought a new type of "mobile" gamer to consoles along with the pandemic that wasn't there before, but I'm having a hard time being convinced that the market dynamic suddenly changed THIS much in 7 years. Or less, since PS4 Pro/X1X re-launch. So, like, in 4 years the domestic console market quintupled? I don't buy it. We don't see a flood of new gamers on the gaming internet. In fact, we see relatively little turnover in the forum/message board population at all. These new hardware buyers don't appear to be assimilating into the "gamer" world, and game sales aren't changing noticeably either. Certain big games show spikes in sales, and a general, moderate upward trend in software sales is there as you'd expect, but nothing quite correlating to the hardware shift. No giant boom of new gamers, big software sales dynamics, etc. Everything but hardware is status-quo with a moderate uptick. So who's buying, and why? And how much of those additional sales are in existing regional markets, and how much are new markets that can't be compared to sales in prior generations because it didn't exist? Something's not quite jiving with this hardware buying obsession. I don't think either company has provided regional numbers other than Japan, about how much per region. We just keep hearing about globally there's more produced. But how about in the US market vs PS4? Same number? More? Less? How much more? Doesn't matter if there's 20% more units if they're units in other markets, and there's no more availability, but more demand here.
Heck even WiiU was completely sold out, no way to get one at launch. It was a frenzy. Then the next batch they made was the last one they ever made. Sales just tanked once they became available and they clogged warehouses. A big part of that, though was probably the Feb Sony PS4 reveal halting any momentum. And a good part of that hype was really Ubisoft's fake PC-render of a Watch Dogs build that didn't exist.
X1X came out and they barely moved at all. PS4 Pro was out and they were harder to get at times, but they were pretty easily available most of the time. That was just a few years ago. Switch was impossible to get year 1 but that's Nintendo underproducing because they were gun shy after WiiU. Switch OLED came out and they're just.....gone.... But Switch's total market is roughly evenly matched with PS back when PS4 Pro launched. Which was a better mid-gen. The size of the market didn't change, but demand doubled? That's not new customers. That's FOMO buying (and scalping.)
I wonder how many of those PS5's were attempts at adding SSDs without heatsinks? Ok, that's a Jab at PS.... Mainly because I keep thinking "I must resist the urge to add an SSD after what happens to my xsx..." Honestly I think the difference in more PS5's in the shop is because MS actually has a REALLY easy warranty process, it's like an Amazon return, zero effort. Sony.......their service is kind of a PITA. Always has been. And an hour on hold at best. Plus, IDK why my 1 year warranty on a console delivered 11/11 is good until 12/1. I didn't have to supply proof of purchase, I hit "register" and it just looked it up automatically . Target (or was it Walmart?) Must have preregistered the serial. And both XSX's in the house show up in my devices in my account, even though one's not my primary, I guess because i've logged in from both, which is odd, all the X1X's don't, but I'm grateful. But if Sony's doing warranty to the real date, that means launch units dropped out of warranty last week, so people are more likely heading to his shop.
I envy your new warranty....
Yeah, I don't know how the gen will go. I've thought it's one of the two (long gen or abandoned gen that never existed), but the third possibility is it forces things to go that mobile route of this being the last "generation" and we're just in for periodic "generational refreshes" over time, phone/PC-style, forever more, so that this gen goes on for decades, but a 2020 model will run games like garbage until games require "2024 model or newer." I don't mind that model, really. I really thought that's how X1X to Series X was going to go to begin with, back when I bought X1X and Series X was "Scarlett." Heck, I'm still impressed with how well X1X still does. If not for the POS CPUs and 2008 HDDs those consoles totally could have kept side by side with Series.
Sony already has us shopping for heatsinks and thermal paste to add to our Crucial SSDs, why not add "minimum system requirements" to console, too?
@SplooshDmg It's absolutely the expanding global market. Sure there's increased revenues through mtx and subs in the primary markets. And normal overall growth in all markets over time. The the market expansion really has to account for most of it. I'd really rather see regional sales figures, rather than division figures. It means nothing. If you're looking at Xbox Japan, and seeing "XBox One revenues growing quarter by quarter" WTF does that actually mean where you are? They sold like 200 of them in 7 years. There's too much focus on "global business" that means jack squat to anyone in a particular place. An investor cares. A partner or competitor or customer in the US doesn't care at all, they care about the domestic market. I really became aware of that listening to Starbucks reports years ago, when they were talking about tremendous growth and increased revenues, and expansion and location growth. And also talked about closing and consolidating locations and trailing numbers. Then they pointed out that sales were lagging badly in the US and they were contracting, and nearly all of their growth was coming from the emerging China market and that's where they were focusing? As a non-investor, nobody here cares if they're growing in China. If they're shrinking here, they're shrinking. If sales are bad here, sales are bad here. Growth in China means absolutely nothing if you don't care about dividends and share price. If you're a supplier of disposables, advertising, ingredients, equipment, etc to Starbucks in the US, market contraction here means your sales are going to take a dive. Growth in China has no relevance at all to you.
WiiU is this really cool Wii controller with a screen in it. Looks kinda like a Switch but it's for your Wii. IDK what it's used for though. I think there was some Starfox game that used it? It's like the PSVR but without the V, or the R, or the PS. There's a lot of Switch games you can play on it.
XSX PSU is running $75 on Amazon, so cheaper than PS5 though....perhaps cheaper in every regard. But the teardown of the chassis looks frustrating. I'm guessing out of warranty (since there aren't any out of warranty we don't know) is a PSU runs $150 to repair. GPU or SSD though, probably $200-250.
But yeah, I mean XSX is just a cheap PC in a PC ecosystem. No harm just updating it with new specs now and again. Would a generational jump be any different than that? Only in the marketing. Not much else to change. It's really just a little PC. Same with PS5, but they have their crazy proprietary hardware bits on there that probably change with licensing, so it's a little harder for them to pull that off, even though Andrew House was the first to propose the concept before even Phil did.
It's killing me knowing there's an XSX drop for W+ members I can't participate in "$100 for a chance to enter."
EDIT2: also looks like a new S bundle is coming out (GS says today but unavailable, BB says 12/2) for normal price with Fortnite and Rocket League. Why does MS hate us?
@SplooshDmg LOL, it's uncommon to find people that "understand" what Starbucks is, and what Starbucks isn't!
Yeah, I kinda get that the stores want to reserve the in demand items for their most regular customers which is going to be their subscription cutsomers. It kind of makes sense. But on the other hand it's extortionate that to get a chance to buy a console you have to pay. I'd actually feel better about it if they were in stock but you had to be a subscriber to check out with it. Or preorder. Like, ok, inventory reserved for loyalty members.....I'm almost ok with that. But to get in line and try (and fail) to claim one you need to front them $100 in advance?? No. Just no. I don't buy enough from them to justify a $100 membership. They already have a store for that, it's called Sam's Club. I'd do their plus instead of Prime if amazon ever really annoys me enough, but there's no point to have both, and I could put that $100 into a scalper fund to get a guaranteed purchase.....SHIPPED BY WALMART! I keep trying to justify waiting for the retailers and still keep coming back to the idea that the scalpers are more fair and legit. Just asking too steep a price to tempt me.
My problem with the Fortnite bundle is they already can't keep up with demand and now they're handing out "free" Fortnite with it. It's like shouting "free beer" in a bar. I mean, you know and I know that Fortnite is already free. Fortnite players don't know that.... People are going to be killed over that.
IDK, still tempted by an S. The Walmart drop first made me think I should wait and get an X. Then I realized it's literally not possible. Maybe after the holidays it will be. or not? Who knows. ATM it's between buy an S now, or just save the funds and buy a scalped X later. This is insane.
@NEStalgia You are generally unlucky with hardware but lucky this time because they are fixing it for free because the warranty was about to expire. We get 2-year warranty over here. The best advice I can give you is play one of the thousand games on any of the thousand consoles and PC that you own until you get your Series X back 😂.
@BlueOcean I'm hoping it's just bad luck! I have the other X in the house...I don't want to have to worry about that one and the repaired one! Plus the PS5s.
But yeah, really lucky it's under warranty. And really lucky they managed to set the warranty date a few weeks after purchase date. Target/Walmart must have sent the automatic registrations in late or something. If it were based on purchase date it would have been something like 6 days out of warranty? I'd have been fuming.
I'm very jealous you get 2 years there. I think all 3 consoles are just 1 year here. Which isn't much of a warranty. Most people don't use consoles as much as we do, and if you're not using it non-stop you're never going to find out if it's defective in time. Heck, I used this one a lot last winter, was idle for a few months while I did xCloud mostly, and then suddenly failed. Under a more "typical" user it might have not failed for another year.
LOL, yeah, I'm probably going to raid that Sony sale and add to the backlog, mostly as a rebound/revenge purchase. Returnal, Demon's Souls.....I keep eying them despite disliking rogues and sucking at Souls.... But I'm working on finishing up Miles now which I got bored playing and never finished. It's still boring and repetitive, but I hated not finishing it, so I can finally delete it and free up the tiny SSD. I should probably finish God of Boi, too, which I was enjoying for a while, and then like Miles, it just dragged on, was repetitive, and bored me. I'm not really motivated to wrap it up, but I hate leaving it unfinished. And I got the GoT expansion and have to play most of HzD which are definitely great games.
I COULD just stream FH5 on the 1X. I did it one night and it played great. But it doesn't look and feel as great, so I hate to spend time playing FH5 in a less than ideal format until I get the X back. Although I'm going to be afraid to run FH5 when I do. I superstitiously feel like that game broke the console. And I really ought to work through like 6 Yakuza games at 100h a pop that I'll never get to. The 1X does that as well as the SX except 7 (which I didn't really expect.)
@SplooshDmg LOL, outside "serious coffee circles" it's EXTREMELY rare to find people that understand just how bad Starbucks is! Let alone the employees, which, as a rule, can be drop-in extras in The Outer Worlds 2.... Fun fact: they actually source the cheapest beans around. The rejects. Stuff even P&G and Nestle won't take for Folgers and the like (and they were already bottom of the barrel.) Random mishmashes from random sources. They burn them until they're just above carbonized to make them uniform in (burnt) flavor, and their black, greasy "espresso blend" is born! Then they convinced the world through the power of Marketing that "espresso roast" is greasy black carbon. Except it isn't. Espresso is a light to medium roasted coffee most of the time. French roast is oily black carbon, but it's meant to be steeped in a press pot, not pressure extracted! But it doesn't matter because like you said, then they drown it all in milk and sugar so the coffee is more of a flavor additive than an actual product. McDonald's (MCDONALDS!) actually sources significantly higher quality beans. It's hilarious. You see Starbucks serving like $7+ coffee drinks, and you know the gas station across the street has a better product for $1.20, and you can wash your windows for free on the way out. And it doesn't force you to endure pretentious hipsters in slick corporate branding. Because nothing says "stick it to the man" in an ironic, organic way quite like identical branded stores from a global corporation seeing massive growth in China
Best Buy remains my favorite. I mean GameStop is GameStop. The Fortnite S bundles were visible there and Best Buy yesterday, now they're not visible at all. (I suspect that was supposed to wait for MS to announce it? They didn't even agree on date.) But Best Buy still lets me add S + controller + GP bundles to my cart, happily lets me get to checkout, happily tells me they're shipping it, but only the controller and GP card are set to ship and the console has the "deliver to" box checked.....and next to it says not available in your zip code. It's hilarious, I can check out a console bundle for $400 where they'd ship the controller and GP card, and not a console, nor is there one in the store to even pick up..... And it's not like "oh they're navigating a difficult time and can't keep up" - this is what Best Buy's site was like 12 years ago! They just never bothered fixing it! It's not a new problem with hard to find consoles, this is just their standard operating practice since forever! IDK how I scored 2 PS5s from them, but I'm pretty sure the fact I was able to score 2 PS5s on launch day on a single order was a symptom of their broken site in and of itself.... Granted it was 2 different SKUs (disc and discless) so they technically SHOULD have let me do it, but most carts didn't. I did do 2 launch Switches in 2017 from Gamestop but it was 2 orders, and was 2 different SKUs (black & red/blue.) Target shockingly did let me do 2 Switch OLEDs, but they were different orders hours apart with 2 different waves of them becoming available for 2 different SKUs (white & red/blue.) But 2 in a single order.....that was shocking and I was worried about cancellation.
IDK where to go with the spare console thing. I keep inching toward pulling the trigger the S, but half of the pull is probably FOMO. If my X breaks again and can't repair, will I be content on the S instead of an X? No, not really. So why am I buying it? Because what if I want it and can't get it when I do? So I'll probably dither about it until they're gone and then be upset I didn't do it. Then I think "well, then I should suck it up and get a scalped one" I've seen it as low as $850 shipped. And then I remember reality exists and wonder how on earth I was considering that price for a console that costs $500 and I already have one (more or less... ) . But then I remember they're impossible to replace and will continue to be impossible, so that's a "bargain"....
I think if the stores were like they were at launch I wouldn't worry. But now....Target won't ship them, Best Buy won't ship them (except when they do), Walmart requires memberships I don't have, and GameStop..... well they're a thing. The only sources at all, even when there is stock, to buy one where you simply hand over money to someone in exchange for them handing you a product is scalpers. No memberships, lotteries, chances to get in line to have seconds to check out, no Surprise Mechanics(TM)....no hour long round-trip odysseys....just, pay money, get product delivered.... Comparing the two, I actually want to support the scalpers instead of the retailers now. It's less sleazy. I just want them to lower the prices to reasonable amounts. Which is basically how I feel about buying Sony games on PSN anyway.... Maybe Ol' Scotchy is sitting on eBay selling a stack of Series X's. Wouldn't doubt it.
@SplooshDmg Haha, it sounds like they accidentally got a "coffee master" that actually knows anything about coffee by mistake Very rare indeed. Right on about the fish oil smell. And the "rich and complex".....P.T. Barnum couldn't have come up with that one, himself! Barnum bent the truth to make one thing sound like another. These guys just straight-up lie. And it works!
I didn't know Hortons made it to the States at all outer than like northern Michigan. I thought it was pretty much all Canada. IIRC, Tim Horton was a hockey star turned coffee chain owner. I guess like Jimmy Dean was a singer turned sausage icon, but less Texan and more Canadian?
This is hilarious. Come to PXB to talk Xbox, end up talking Schomer lol
Yeah, I mean, the S is an easy buy, it's just there....but. Maybe it would do better to wait for GS since there's a slight hope there.
@SplooshDmg LOL, it's like you're inside my head! Maybe I'm just imagining you and you don't actually exist. That happens. People stare. Totally with you on Panera, but I've never heard anyone say it out loud before. I can't understand how they're successful at all. They're on every single street corner, and they have like, what is it, half a sandwich and a bag of chips for like $10 or something ridiculous. Who eats that little for a meal? I mean it literally says it on the sign - it's half a meal! They should call them Halfie Meals. I love how they have these tiny bundt cakes they sell by the slice, or you can buy the whole thing for like $25. It's like a $7 supermarket bundt cake and tastes the same. One year I bought a bag of their dinner rolls, only available on holidays, for Thanksgiving. I threw the entire bag out. They were horrific. It was like eating packing peanuts. But the peanuts made of corn so they have more flavor. I thought I was insane thinking of Panera as overpriced and under-served though. Nobody says it and everyone seems to like it. Weird thing is the place feels like a campus cafeteria. Who wants tiny amounts of expensive food in a campus cafeteria? They call it a "bakery-cafe". I call it sandwich scalping. Sorry. Half-a-sandwich scalping.
LOL, surreal. Nobody else reading even has a clue what we're talking about. We've transplanted CG to PXB. It's the right shade of green, though!
"There really is hope at GameStop"
See, when we get to that sentence, that's when I realize I'm done with this life.....
I went back through emails and it's been since early October that I've seen an Xbox drop from them....I feel like they were more frequent months ago and they've kind of slowed down. But yeah, that may be the right ticket.
@SplooshDmg I truly hope your area never becomes what this area has. All we have is oceans of Panera that's basically considered "budget food", and anyone with status would certainly eat at finer places. The little sandwich shops and the like charge like $10-15 for a lunch-type sandwich. Heck that was pre-pandemic inflation....it's got to be even worse than that now. Panara is the "cheap" one. Everyone on the losing side of the class struggle just had to give up and move. To Eastern KY. Years ago. It'll sit next to the dog bakery (no I'm not joking.) (And no they don't bake dogs, they bake treats for dogs for like $8 a pop.) We're all boutiques here now.
I used to say on the XB thread on NL that every traffic light here looks like a Forza Horizon starting grid. I'm not even joking. Forza is supposed to be a thrilling escape to a world of exotic cars all over. It just looks like lunch hour when I play it. So do the speeds they're going...... I see more Mercedes, BMWs and Porches at a random traffic light than you'll ever see on screen at once in FH5. Virtually all the SUV models, though. There's like 5 of those hideous Porche Cayenne S's at every single light, guaranteed. And that's old school. Now the Lambos, Teslas, AMGs, McLarens, and Maserati's are popping over the place. Not commodity-common like Porches and Bimmers, but common enough Saw two legit DeLoreans frequently for a year or two, though, that was pretty cool. It was not going 88MPH. Which is rare, here. False advertising I guess. Forza's not exciting, it's just a commute simulator. I think I need some escapism. I'mm'a download Lawn Mower Simulator.
And of course you can hear them street racing at night constantly if you're sitting outside even from far away. I'm pretty good now at picking out the true supercars from the souped up Civic riffraff. I can almost always pick the McLarens out. They have that high pitched whine to the engines. But every time I hear them racing I just declare "WORLD PREMIERE". It's definitely Forza, because if it were NFS there'd be police sirens. There aren't. I think they're hiding.
Ever want to just take the barn find 1968 Beetle and go into a Street Race event just to tick off all the other players? That's me IRL.
There's a site that tracks when stores had their last drop. Probably not totally accurate, but Walmart and Best Buy seem to get drops twice a month or so. Some stores haven't had a drop since July. Newegg was April. It's pretty crazy how few drops there are. You'd think with MS money they could sort out manufacturing at least as well as Sony though. Weird they're so behind.
@SplooshDmg wow, it looks like GameStop has removed x and s entirely from the site now. Just a blank product page of you click on x and s consoles. That's new since today. This is just plain weird now!
Target removed the product page for x entirely as well. Still list out of stock s. Walmart is getting a Monday drop for plus members, but it's almost like these things are discontinued otherwise. I'm assuming retailers are being told they're not getting more stock for the holiday so they're just removing the product listing completely. Scalpers truly are the only Xbox dealers now.
Checking that stock report tool, not all retailers have a listed date but it seems like best buy and Walmart are the only stores getting drops. Target hasn't had one since May. GameStop was early October. Only Walmart and best buy, locking even trying behind subscriptions and/or store pickups, show any recent drops at all. I don't want to call Phil a liar but it seems like shipments total in the hundreds, maybe thousands, and I'm wondering if there's a massive production problem we don't know about. Phil did say it's more than just the chip shortage. But Sony seems a lot less affected.
I'm actually kind of on the fence for game purchases. I buy all 3rd party on Xbox, but with how uncertain replacing them could be, I'm half tempted to buy the $300 or so in black Friday sale games on PS5 instead.
Plus I'm paying for a month of gp I'm not using, and will miss the Halo drop... Which is frustrating. i might stream it but I hate for the first impression to look like a YouTube e3 presentation.
@NEStalgia Not to make a joke out of your situation, but maybe it will be like love where it's not supposed to matter what it looks like? If you end up loving Halo Infinite even if it looks like a YouTube e3 presentation, then I guess it's "true love"?
PSN ID/Xbox Live Gamertag: KilloWertz
Switch Friend Code: SW-6448-2688-7386
@NEStalgia I doubt FH5 has any special console-destroying properties. It's probably just a freak occurrence. You get that with all electronics, but I imagine it's more likely with launch units.
Only real complaints I've heard about PS5 to date is analog stick drift on the DualSense.
Grabbing the Series S seems like it makes more sense to me if you've concentrated your purchases in that ecosystem digitally. Although, on the other hand, you already own a PS5, right? So playing on that and waiting to score another Series X makes sense too if you're not invested in an exclusive or GamePass title. I'd probably be tempted by that device if I didn't already have a large collection of physical 360 games. The lack of physical bc makes it a no go for me, unfortunately.
They're hard to find online (Series S), but I see them everywhere in Wal-Marts.
@Ralizah Probably a freak thing. I have flashbacks of rrod and ylod, so I it triggers me. I remember people thinking Valhalla was causing it early. But therev was a weird correlation that the same game seemed cited in most of the reports of psu problems. Maybe certain games use a certain feature that uses power in a certain way that's more likely to cause a problem. Who knows.
Yeah I've heard of stick drift on ds5.... Sony controllers are the only controllers I've never had drift on (others did though) but they've always set rediculous dead zones so mechanical drift might go on unseen. Ds5 finally has normal stick sensitivity, so I'm betting ps only players are going to be seeing drift a lot more than they're used to.
Yeah I'm still, as expected, on the fence as to grabbing that s or just playing the waiting game. Add long as one of the pair doesn't break again I'm not in a rush really, it's a spare to sit in the box, tough an s might make a great local streaming box to stream console to my phone like a Switch Pro lol. Xcloud lacks quick resume which kills that switch like pick up and play. An S would do it. But if it's a cold spare, it'd just sit in the box. I'm super invested in the digital ecosystem. I do have a lot of physical 360 games, but I already rebought most if the bc ones digitally for cheap. And that gen I was originally more PS3, so a lot of the physical games i have from then are trapped forever on the abandoned console.
Walmart.... Lol the last time i was in a physical Walmart I think I bought Halo CE for PC at launch..... That dates it pretty well. Physical pc games, and halo 1 as we wait for 6.5......
@SplooshDmg You're right, they put the product pages back up. Super weird stuff. Actually it looks like they have all access available now. But, much as that sounds great, I still don't trust it. The price is great and the payments are fun, but who knows if the orders really work, and I'd still assume it would go bad and ding my credit for nothing. With this one it's probably solid, but with GameStop who knows. I've been burned by console preorders they oversold before.
@SplooshDmg Don't you have to have signed up 24h in advance? For $12 I'd try that, especially since it applies to black friday anyway. Though watch, I do it and can't cancel...
No groceries though, my 20-40-minute away Walmart doesn't have groceries (strangely the 30-50 minute away Target down the street in the opposite direction from Walmart that's considered equally local now does...), If I could get grocery I'd have been a member day 1. Instead I'm stuck with Whole Paycheck and the usual Whole Foods pricing and weeeeird inventory debauchery, or the local stores, which for grocery we do actually have. I'm surprised we do still have local grocery stores (used to be 5 min round trip, now with a ton of new lights that now last 4x longer each, it's like 15 min round trip.) Nobody here buys groceries, they just dine out all the time.
I truly envy you in KY. I dream of that sometimes. Ever since that Springer/Judge Judy-esque thing with Rand Paul getting attacked by his surgeon neighbor while mowing his lawn and they mentioned the value of his like 25 acre estate, and I was thinking "holy geeze, you couldn't even buy a ghetto crib for that here!" This used to be nice until about 15 years ago, then it started escalating into New Brooklyn at an exponential pace. Not old, cool Brooklyn that was Little Italy. Current Brooklyn that's nothing but 6 figure earning hipsters. I guess they all moved here. All the superlux high rise apartments they build everywhere literally says that on the ad. Not Brooklyn. It says "targeting high-earning millennials in the 6-figure bracket." It actually says that. Like getting a back of box summary on your nightmares. Well, what happens to the costs in your local economy when it's inhabited mostly by "high earning millennials in the 6-figure bracket'? You need to spend like they do as a baseline to exist. Although their superlux rentals also include cooking classes in the common rooms (OMG they make 6 figures, they live in a glorified dorm, and they can't figure out how to flip a pancake on their own....why are we entrusting the important functions of the world to these people??])
Where once there were lots of normal and mom & pop stores, the landscape is basically: CVS, Panera, CVS, CVS, Gas Station/minimart, CVS, Starbucks, Starbucks, Panera, Upscale dining I know I can't afford the kids menu, chain restaurant, chain restaurant, GAMESTOP, upscale dining, hair salon that starts at $250 (not joking), Panera, CVS. Used to be cell phone stores and banks between each CVS and Panera, but they've actually all closed now, too. When they close, stuff stays abandoned for 6 years before becoming retirement estate planning, tax prep, medical diagnostics, medical office, or remodeling consultation office. Or an overpriced restaurant. And because the rent is so high, even the little places charge a fortune for everything. Like in NY, a normal business just cant survive. You need tons of revenues to just pay the basic rent, labor & utilities. So you go luxury and price out the commoners. Eventually even the chains figure out they're not making money and leave.
Imagine a town where Jim Ryan was mayor. That town is here.
@SplooshDmg I can't imagine Walmart succeeding in making the website better where GameStop and Best Buy have managed to do the opposite for 10 years. I'd be half tempted, should have thought of walmart yesterday. I might try it if it's not too late. I didn't know they had monthly. I was going to order laundry detergent there and pay shipping anyway, because Amazon has it, but they force you to buy the giant gallon size which somehow costs about 40% more per ounce than buying several small bottles and paying shipping through Walmart..... So if nothing else I pay like $8 since the rest of the month covers shipping. OTOH I could do the free trial for that and not waste $13, but not for an xb.
Holy frack.... $38k is what a smaller house than that here cost in the 1970s! A house that was 38k in the 70's is roughly $200-250k now. BUT sale value is "worthless" if another 200k hasn't been put in to "modernize" it, of course... Then you just have to flip to the cash for houses guys that buy it at bargain prices. Of which they send out mass mailers advertising this twice weekly. There was one soliciting people to basically "turn in" unwanted paupers in your neighborhood so they can try to force a buyout to raise the value or your property! Seriously, report the undesirables so we can squeeze them out for your financial benefit! It's literally an environment where unless your star is on the rise, everyone is your enemy and every shadow is a threat.
Everyone "supports" politicians that make everything expensive and miserable, particularly aging boomers, because they plan to sell at the new inflated value then move somewhere like KY and blow all the cash, and rapidly turn there into here and elect their own into the local politics who will invite as many big land development companies into the area as they can to rapidly convert it and raise the values. For the people that actually live here you just get higher taxes and unaffordable living. You couldn't even remodel a kitchen for $38k here. You're looking at $90k+ MINIMUM for a kitchen remodel. (My kitchen is kitchen-a-go-go, it it will be until I'm dead, because I'm not remodeling a thing.... ) Those apartments for 6 figure millennials have a $1500-3000/mo rents. Imagine $3k money to blow on nothing but rent and dine luxury daily? And having to keep up with their spending because business has to charge "what the market will sustain" and sustaining 4x the average, it will. So you pay it too whether you can afford it or not. I have a deck that's falling apart. It was maybe $1200 back when it was built. A DECK costs $15,000-20,000 here. Most BATHROOMS are worth $30,000 here (Mine's worth $5 and a pack of TicTacs) . But of course the contractors need to make like $70k a year to call it a decent living, and one told me half the cost just goes out in taxes. Generally if I can't DIY it (and I'm a gamer nerd so the general rule is I can't) I'll just badly DIY it forever... Tom Nook can go fluff himself.
High real estate doesn't just apply to housing of course. Imagine what it does to commercial real estate. A small restaurant has to charge $30+ a plate, because they have to pay rent that's 20x what it is where you are, and then all the taxes on top of that, just to break even. Let alone labor costs. This used to be a place where people burned leaves in a fire barrel. Now it's.....this. And you can only get rid of leaves in authorized green-approved recycled paper bags (that cost like $4 each....and you need like 30 of them annually.) Thus, everything costs through the roof. Not just the small places. The big places also abandon it. Who'd buy a 150,000 sq foot retail space at that cost per square foot and charge national prices? Nobody. So they build them out in nowhere land and you have to travel 3 6-lane highways to get to them. So we're a super-rich area with no stores other than a handful of boutiques that sell upcycled Jimmy Choos like they're old Filas.
I stopped going anywhere, basically ever. Not only is it a high-risk hassle and stressful to do so, and only have the distances become 8x longer than they used to be, but whenever I go anywhere I just end up angry for days seeing yet more nice things I used to like plowed down and more tracts of 850 new luxury townhomes or new office plazas for 6300 employees as far as the eye can see. I don't really recognize much of anything anymore, and whatever is there is meant for people who are not me who live a way of life I don't live. So.....I'll buy more video games. The virtual world is much more recognizable than the "real" one here now. Sure there's magical elf zombies and alien death ships. But there's no doggie bakeries in the virutal world. I can make sense of magical elf zombies and alien death ships. They're dead and angry (at millennial luxury apartments) and use their magic instead of their words. Or they're just trying to find a new homeworld (because they filled their old one with apartment blocks and abandoned unaffordable retail.) I will never fudging understand the fudging doggie bakery. Ever. If you can buy $10/ea snacks for your prized toy poodle you can buy me a freaking scalped xbox so I don't have to see it.
It really is truly horrible in ways that really defy words. It's literally like a foreign occupation. The way of life, the culture, the people, the "vibe" all of it is literally a foreign culture I'm not from, don't recognize, can't participate in, and don't really want to. I live in the internet world because the real world doesn't really exist here anymore. Not unless you've got cash to burn. And even if I did, I'm not sure I'd classify those people as "real". Everything's a fake show of status. It's like Facebook's brick and mortar location.
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Topic: Uhh guys, my series x just died
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