AMD Surprised By Demand For Next-Gen Consoles At Launch

Of course there is a higher demand when there is also a certain percentage of these consoles being held hostage by scalpers. A percentage that will only grow unless online retailers do something to prevent their bots from locking up sites and preventing real customers from buying them - especially since "in-person" stock is probably still a long way off (though, if you can spend an hour in a grocery store to buy food while practicing safe COVID measures, one can certainly spend 10 minutes in a store buying a console while practicing safe COVID measures).

If 100K consoles end up in scalpers hands across the globe, then that's 100K people across the globe still looking for a console.

Not saying the consoles aren't popular, I just think demand still isn't properly getting met.

@GamingFan4Lyf
It's the same with every console launch.
Demand always out weighs the supply for a few months. Then you obviously throw scalpers into the mix.
Probably made even worse this time around due to the pandemic.

Definition of being British. Went onto Currys this morning on the off chance they have Series X in stock (do it every morning) and was put in a queue (over 200,00th in the queue no less). No idea what the queue was for but hoped it was for Series X so I politely sat in the queue until it said there were no more PS5's left. Damn...

I’m surprised they are surprised. There has never been a better time to release a new console- when the world is stuck in their homes from a pandemic. The only thing I could see negatively impacting the launch is the effect COVID has had on the economy.

How is AMD surprised that new technology is popular? Are they new to this? That's kind of funny, but kind of sad. "Oh well we thought consoles were kind of dying. We read it on the internet. Guess we should crank out some more SoCs eh?

@StonyKL I find it confusing that if you trust the internet, nobody in the UK even knows Xbox is a real thing people buy and Playstation is the only gaming console. Yet they seem to be sold out just as infinitely. It's like there's an underground Xbox movement there the public doesn't know about.

@GamingFan4Lyf At least in the US scalpers have to compete with the USPS. They may have ordered all the units, but all the scalper units are sitting in postal trailers in random parking lots for months.

@NEStalgia yeah Xbox is nowhere near as popular as PS5 in UK but think that's true for everywhere except US. Oddly I got a PS5 but can't get hold of the Series X here, but I also think its partly due to the Series S restricting X productivity. It takes several days before it sells out versus the 3 minutes it takes for the X. Really wish they'd have spend the resource all out on the X and waited for a year before pushing the S as I reckon that will be aimed at the casual market who can get everything with a similar priced One X anyway.
Perhaps I'm just grumpy though.

@StonyKL Yeah, the S market is definitely not the early adopters. Though I see why they needed to get it out there now. IF they sold the power console early, then released a weak console later it would look like a step back rather than putting both options at launch and saying you can choose what power you want. It may seem silly now, knowing only the enthusiasts are buying now and the S market isn't really buying yet, but it makes sense in that, next year, when the S market is buying, they'll look and say "yeah I wanted the new xboxes, so I'll get an S and join in" rather than looking like things are so desperate at xbox they're cutting corners and releasing budget consoles as a last ditch.

Seems weird now, but I think, over the long term this type of release has positive optics "they're selling two models with a choice" rather than sending the appearance of "moving downmarket" by introducing it later. Good business and PR. But it does seem silly looking at it from our angle this early in the game. They did it right, but it makes for some frustration for the enthusiast customers. (Plus if they didn't introduce it yet but had devs working with it, it would have been leaked anyway.... heck it got leaked even before they introduced it before launch!)

Sounds like maybe AMD is partly behind some production limitations though. Even if MS and Sony could crank out a billion units a day, they'd still have to wait for whatever volume AMD was poised to crank out, and it sounds from this like AMD severely underestimated demand. They might be the real culprit behind both shortages.

I should think AMD are looking at both Sony and Xbox selling well and thinking "Win-Win".

@blinx01 Yeah, but if this keeps up a few months could turn into a whole year just due to the fact that previous launches still had in-store stock that you could feasibly get your hands on if you went to a store first thing in the morning to check on stock.

With the internet, there is no wait for store to open. Things on the internet could pop up at any random time and if you are 1 minute late, it's too late.

So while scalpers have always existed, I think it's much worse this time around as companies suddenly got a conscience regarding these consoles and doing online-only - despite the box stores still being open (at least in the US) - which is much easier to exploit than having to get up early and stand in the cold to wait for doors to open.

@Kefka2589 It seems unlikely to me they'd be building actual servers with "actual" Series X hardware. That would be dramatically inefficient in terms of floor space, power consumption, cooling ability, networking, etc. I would guess the server hardware is a custom blade setup using either Xbox architecture on a totally different server die, with many more cores, running virtualized "Xbox" Hyper-V instances like most cloud instances would be for Windows (Azure, etc.) Something that could be thought of as a Series Y. Or a Series XXL. Or Series XXX. Maybe that's a different product for a different market....

But either way I doubt it's something sharing the same fab as the consumer/dev boxes, and is probably a separate fab making just the server products. Not to mention, the server product wouldn't need high production, they'd be making a few thousand of them total so they could be more or less individually made and cost a pretty penny as a custom fab. They won't be sold anywhere other than MS's datacenters, after all.

@Kefka2589 Oh it's huge, no doubt. But it's a whole separate line of business for certain. And the server architecture definitely won't compete with consumer hardware for production resources. It's a whole other scale of very low production yield on very high cost, high complexity components. That's not rolling off the same factory lines. The tooling and tolerances are quite different, and sky's the limit pricing is in full effect.