Xbox Boss: The Industry Needs To Rethink Console Pre-Orders

For me it's simple : don't let more than one preorder by person, and to avoid bots, you have to provide something like a copy of your ID card, or something.

@graysoncharles I was going to say the same thing, however, I don't know if that's going to change anything since bots will just flood websites on day one instead of on pre-order day. And they could just buy up the entire stock meant for the masses rather than a limited number of pre-order stock.

I would say that physical stores should do pre-orders in-person only and online stores do Captcha verification for high demand pre-order items to help prevent bots.

I would also say that places like eBay shouldn't allow pre-ordered systems to be sold on their store-fronts to help take the wind out of the scalper's sails.

@graysoncharles issue with that is that a lot of stores are not doing in store purchases of the Series X and ps5 bc of the pandemic, so there would be no way or very few ways to get one for launch day if they did this

I’m glad to hear Phil say this. I never go through the nightmare of trying to pre-order a console. I have a job & can’t be home all day refreshing websites.

What would semi-fix this problem is just launch the consoles when there is actually enough stock on hand to please your customers.

The main problem is bots and scalpers. I don't know how console makers can address that, but I'm glad they recognize the frustration of so many customers as a problem.

lottery systems and/or registered mail or in-person only reservations with some kind of global address verification so one household really is limited to one console. (or something like that)

One step would be to reject preorder culture. Game companies have taken advantage of FOMO and hype through preorders. And now people have been trained to want that brand new thing on day one. When you have Sony vetting gamers for preorders, Nintendo limiting the availability of products both in numbers and time frame, and CDPR announcing a game 7 years before the planned launch, that culture will always be there.

MS has been no better when it comes to the next gen. They've spent months drip feeding info on the new consoles, building the hype and excitement. Of course people are going to be disappointed if they don't get one after months of anticipation. And while it makes business sense to want to build that hype, you can't also then say you wish you didn't have to disappoint people. You've actively created this situation.

The funny thing is, the new direction for xbox would be perfect for rejecting preorder culture. Instead of always focusing on the absolute brand new products, they can highlight the years old games also, and shadow drop new releases. Undo some of that training, and attempt to create a new norm where gamers aren't always looking for that brand new thing, and may actually be discovering old classics they've never experienced. Then maybe they won't carry that preorder mentality over to new hardware.

what’s worse than preorders? no preorders. and having a million plus people rushing stores.

It’s not good missing out on release day 1, I’m going to have to wait to get a PS5 myself but I feel it’s just the way things are. Could preorders be managed better? Yeah probably, but it’s the same with sought after concert tickets or anything in high demand, once they go up for preorder there’ll always be issues as people flock to get them.

I would like to see maybe more units available at launch though, let people go crazy getting a preorder but make sure there’s a good number available to buy day one and have a good steady chain of stock constantly hitting stores after release. At the moment both MS and Sony are struggling with supply leaving us all wondering when we can pick up one of these consoles with vague timeframes of when more stock may arrive. There seems to have been no other plan apart from sellout preorders, cash in and then take it from there.

@Kefka2589 think you are more likely to get killed by the Xbox out of the t shirt cannon if it's hits you

@graysoncharles All that does is delay and double the same exact problem. It would be the same scenario on one day instead of two, and they'd still sell out in 12 minutes.

@Bobobiwan That also gets complicated though, like in my case I always preorder two. It's for two people, but I'm the one with the accounts and cards and does all the ordering. Granted, most preorders are "one per person" already, and thus nothing's really different there, it has to be different retailers (or in the case of Switch and PS5 different SKUs/editions of the same thing.) As a concept it makes sense, but especially with online stuff, that gets tricky as each individual doesn't necessarily do the ordering. And, no, digital sales should not involve IDs....ever....that's a much worse security risk than not getting a console.

@koffing I'm not sure limiting to one per household really works too....on paper it makes sense, but with how I do the console setups etc, if I can't get two, I don't really need one. One per PERSON obviously makes more sense, but households with multiple people, and more, that intend to play multiplayer together without resorting to awful split screen on the handful of games that support it, do require more than one unit in the household to use as intended. Those kinds of restrictions get arbitrary....they're telling you how to use it mostly to avoid someone else scalping it.

@GamingFan4Lyf And in-person only...that works for even less people. At least with the US setup. It might work in Europe or such, but in the US where most of us are half an hour or more away from a store selling them? It doesn't really work for nobody that works....or goes to school....or really is anything other than preorders opening at noon on a Sunday. And that's a scene I really wouldn't want to see standing in line in the regional shopping center with hundreds of sweaty gamer nerds, knowing I'm still not going to get one.

@Kefka2589 I guess my point was make sure you have the supply to meet demand, which both Sony and MS do not. Saying that though in a competitive market there’s no way MS or Sony are going to hold off a release until there’s enough units while the other is releasing anyway.

That’s why I think there’s not much that can be done to combat the issue.

@Bobobiwan sorry but big no on both of those. Someone like me who planned on buying 2 for myself absolutely should be able to. I agree with one per store but I should freely be able to order one from multiple retailers. As far as IDs go, definitely not. That has the potential to open up a whole host of other problems

As mentioned by others, and somewhat attempted (badly) by Sony this time, is a sort of registration system. That's probably the only one of 3 ways to do it. The reality is, the only way to truly be fair about it is

1: The ideal: Actually make enough supply to reasonably fulfill demand. This is a challenging one because demand can be hard to predict, and even if it weren't, there's the logistics problem of actually having production for that long a time and warehousing for that long of time to actually make it financially viable. But the entire point of preorders is so that supply can meet demand. But the gaming industry doesn't use them that way. They just presell with the quantities they were going to produce regardless. For a preorder to function as an actual preorder to affect supply for demand, they'd have to take preorders months, if not a year out from availability like Kickstarters do. Not weeks before launch while the units are already in distribution. That's not a preorder, it's just a marketing tool to generate buzz by selling some units while they're in transit. A real preorder has you buy or put a deposit on a product to commit to buy it so they know to produce enough that everyone that wants one will be able to. What we have now, is the same thing as no pre-orders, but with two days to scramble to buy one instead of one. It's the same allotment either way which is the actual problem. Not the means by which preorders are placed.

2: IF going with the current system there's really only two more options. The first one is the one Sony kind of tried but effed it up colossally. A registry. It would make most sense if preorders were available to existing customers first rather than opening up the wide market to everyone who may be interested. A bit of a loyalty program that allows for validity checks. Sony did "register your interest" but then they messed it up by making it a weird, clanestine, legally questionable, process of choosing hand picked people to offer preorders to based on your "history and interests" - AKA they selected useful social marketing tools based on data mining. Some folks on the boards here got offers from Sony. I didn't. Did I not win the lottery, was my profile not the one they were looking for because I bought more games on XB than PS? Not enough hours logged onto my PS? Not enough "Friends" on the list? Who can say.

Offer it to existing customers, one per MS Account/PSN account with actual gameplay data demonstrating it's not a bot. Not a difficult check. The bots aren't going to have scattered trophies/achievements, save data, random play hours over time, etc. That solves the one per household/person thing - it's tied to your player account, not anything else. Yes that means ONLY current customers get the offer. But for a preorder is that so bad? It's a reward for loyal customers to be the first in line to get access to the next product. Like buying one of those premium line jumper tickets to Disney World because you owned the PS4/X1.

Now the problem with this is retailers. That means all preorders are direct and that wouldn't fly with retailers. So they'd have to have a central system where they distribute codes or something, one use per, and the participating retailers would have to verify those codes. Which would work because their websites wouldn't be crashing because everyone without a code wouldn't be trying.

3: The simplest and cheapest solution from a retailer perspective, but the less advantageous one overall, but the only real option as a last resort: Take a page from Amazon's old Black Friday sales before they did the whole "thousands of pages of $0.31 cents off millions of products for 39 days!" version of Black Friday. They used to offer maybe a dozen products throughout the day on Black Friday. You'd click in that you want to participate in the drawing for a chance to buy. And they'd email you if you were chosen.

......I was never chosen......

But it's the system they went to after the first few years of "everyone race to buy the product all at once until Amazon goes down" like a console preorder. And it worked until they went to an unending stream of non-sales plus a few real ones laced within.

And yes, mighty Amazon actually got taken down with the "everyone race to buy everything" version of Black Friday.....bleak years those were.

No matter what, preorders need to somehow either be preorders to actually commit to a production supply to match, meaning preorders have to take place well in advance of the product launch. Or we need a real registration system where real existing customers can easily be vetted as not bots and one per player account can be confirmed. Or we at least need a "sign up, random chance, win the lottery, get a code, then buy it from that" system so it's not a free for all race to who can click a button fastest. The problem with signups is it doesn't really prevent bots....a 2fa via email doesn't confirm they didn't create tons of shadow emails for just that purpose. But at least customers are chosen at random, bots and all, rather than whoever clicks fastest, which is bots.

A forth road, is, maybe, take preorders BEFORE the hype and marketing builds up to limit demand. Only the core audience is following these things in advance. Open preorders last January. CUT OFF preorders by May. By the time the mass market finds out whats up they'll just have to wait for retail availability. But that does mean having to blind buy products you know too little about. Even if it's a non-refundable deposit.

(Apologies for the multipost, but the length limit required it!)

Oh, and that all ignores Nintendo who will continue to produce 100 consoles, market it during the Super Bowl, then try to play catch up for 18 months, before telling you that the console won't be available beyond Christmas so if you want it now, you'll have to check Ebay. Please Understand(TM)

Bad as this preorder was, nothing compares to the way Nintendo shorts supply.....I don't think they care about meeting demand. They just want to see steady numbers matching predictions even if it's half of what demand would support, as long as they can fulfill demand sometime after the next console comes out....

I already dread Switch 2's launch.....

@graysoncharles Fair point, I was thinking in terms of the preorder-day chaos where it was impossible to even get the product in the cart to checkout, and not as much the delays and late cancellations and such (I was one of those people stiffed by Gamestop last year with the KH3 LE PS4 Pro where I ordered in January, and then the day before they were supposed to ship it cancelled almost all the online preorders with a "sorry we screwed up." sob story.....been there, and still worried silly for the next 12 days about this one!)

Though the false hopes are easier to solve than the buying spree issue. The buying spree does get doubled in problem because the early adopters and post-marketing mass market will now be trying to buy all on the same day. The retailers sites can't handle preorder day, and that's merely part of the total launch market! And the bots still have full reign.

The false hopes could be solved invisibly by the MFRs simply delivering solid numbers to retailers, telling them to only sell that many (or a fixed percentage of oversell for cancellation projections), and holding them to that, with punitive action for retailers they find out are cancelling orders.

The retailers oversell as a cancellation buffer (they shouldn't oversell what they do on that) they oversell on high estimates on allotments, but one thing GameStop, and you can't tell me Walmart and others don't do the same, is intentionally oversell as a pressure tool to demand greater allotment using customers as hostages. The MFRs of these popular projects could so easily solve that part of the equation by putting the leash on their retailers....this is what you're going to sell for this initial allotment, period

But it still doesn't do much to solve the way preorders are used to begin with. The fact that preorders have nothing to do with adjusting supply is the real problem and everything else is dancing around it.

@Bobobiwan Yes, like only allow one order per credit card and cross reference that with billing address, name and require the setup of a user account. If quarantine has taught us anything, it is that bots need to go. They are creating artificial shortages in everything.

@NEStalgia I live in the US. It's a fair point, I do have a biased, suburb, lives-5-minutes-from-civilization point of view.

As far as being near a bunch of sweaty nerds...I am guessing you have never been to a 'Con before. LOL!

It doesn't matter when you make a product available to buy, you will still get a mad panic as people and scalpers try to get hold of products. The best way is to ensure you have more than enough stock to meet demand!

Another way is to offer a registration process with customers with a 'history' of buying on that site or, in the case of MS, has a MS account and existing console, given priority - instead of selling to the first come and newly registered potential scalpers. If for example, I have a history of ordering games and hardware with a site, a linked console with MS, then it stands to reason I am a gamer and going to be buying a console to game on - not some bot/scalper just trying to secure a console to stick on ebay to rip off gamers who missed out.

How about they set aside some percentage of stock for preorders and some for r in store sales like they currently do. With pre-orders, you get a window of 1-3 months of when you will receive it. Then they ship them out as more stock becomes available in the order that pre orders were received.

So maybe I didn’t order in time for launch day, but I’d get one in the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th shipment from Microsoft. And just cancel it if you happen to find one sooner.

i think the main issue IS the bots. people who want to buy up all the consoles, then sell them for triple the price. but the only way to stop that is for people not to buy from scalpers.

Solution is simple: Before even announcing a release date; put up a window to preorder, and accept all up until the window closes. Then use that to figure out manufacturing; and announce a series of launches when the batches of units are released.

@Whybox @Nermannn Yeah, you might be onto something. Or even more. Don't actually have limited preorders. Just allow orders to be placed in an open system indefinitely, and instead of promising "launch day shipping" just schedule estimated receipt based on order and production. So the idea of a preorder stops being "get it day 1" and becomes "get in the line and reserve yours now." Fixing it by changing what preorder actually means. it's not as nice getting a day 1 console, but it would still sell peace of mind knowing you've reserved your console and have an estimated date of when you'll get it rather than a mad dash to secure one that was already made and not knowing when more will be available stable enough to mad dash for again.

That doesn't halt bots and scalpers because people will still be willing to pay for day 1, but it does knock some wind from their sails if people can be assured to get one around a certain date rather than FOMO reactions and uncertainty.

@GamingFan4Lyf Once.....It was fun, but I don't think I'd go again.

In store. One per customer. Now, if the scalpers wanna pay people to stand in line, so forth and so on, then do it.

@graysoncharles Sort of... but two issues I can think of. Some people work and can't get out of work, thus they can't be there when a store opens. So in that case, it isn't that fair is it? The other issue, specific to this year, is that would bring out droves of people, unnecessarily, during a global pandemic where we are supposed to social distance.

Releasing the thing a month before Christmas is going to cause shortages and disappointment. If the new consoles were released in March, then there wouldn’t be the pressure to have one for Timmy to open on Christmas Day, and supply lines wouldn’t be bogged down with other Christmas products. Plus by the time you got to next Christmas, core gamers would have the thing, production would increase after ironing out the faults, plus there would be actual worthwhile games to market for release at a key time.

There's nothing you can do about it..