The Xbox Series X and S launched last week, but if you weren’t lucky enough to have a pre-order or snag one of the few launch-day units, you might be waiting until next year — that’s when there might be enough Xbox supply to easily pick up a new console off the shelf, according to a top Xbox exec.
“I think we’ll continue to see supply shortages as we head into the post-holiday quarter, so Microsoft’s Q3, calendar Q1,” said Xbox chief financial officer Tim Stuart at the Jefferies Interactive Entertainment Virtual Conference. (You can read a transcript of Stuart’s full remarks at the conference at Seeking Alpha.)
That’s not an altogether surprising statement, as Xbox chief Phil Spencer tried to set expectations about short supply at the end of October. “We’re gonna have more demand than we do supply, and I’ll apologize in advance to people for that,” he said on the Dropped Frames podcast. “I think we’re gonna live in that world for a few months that we’re going to have a lot more demand than we do supply.”
And Spencer apologized again for the limited number of Xbox consoles at Twitch’s virtual Glitchcon event. “We’ve been building them for almost two months and trying to get as many into the stores as we can, but the demand is just so high,” he said.
The Xbox Series X and S supply situation could turn around early next year, though, according to Stuart. “When we get to Q4, all of our supply chain [is] continuing to go full speed heading into kind of the pre-summer months,” Stuart said. (Microsoft’s fiscal Q4 takes place from April through June.) “And that’s where I start to — I expect to see a little bit of the demand — the supply profile, meeting the demand profile.”
Microsoft isn’t the only company that expects shortages of its new gaming products this year. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in early October that the company expects to see shortages of its RTX 3080 and 3090 graphics cards until next year. And it doesn’t seem like there are a lot of PlayStation 5 consoles to go around, either, based on my colleagues’ experiences trying to snag one last week.
