Guess What Else You Can’t Buy? PS5 And Xbox Series X Fall Short

2020, The Year That Just Keeps Not Giving

Of all the losses accrued during 2020, computer hardware is not the most devastating, but it is certainly annoying.  The supply chain has been disrupted from top to bottom since the beginning of the year and unfortunately it takes more than a couple of months to be able to fully reestablish.   The most recent issue is of course the one above, as it is not a Feliz Navi-day except for some members of Team Red that were apparently given links to pre-order before the rest of us.

There is a shortage which may have more impact on two companies bottom line than NVIDIA and AMD’s dearth of supply, as both Microsoft and Sony failed to match the launch numbers of their previous console releases.  As these are significantly larger and more widely watched releases the shortfall could have a huge impact on both companies bottom line. 

In Sony’s case they sold 118,085 PlayStation 5 which is significantly lower than the claimed one million from the PS4 launch.  In Microsoft’s case the sold a combined 20,534 units of its Xbox Series X and S from November 10th to 16th, with numbers of the previous XBox Live also being claimed to be one million units.  Those numbers from the previous launch are up for debate, but whichever of the many counts you accept as accurate they were far larger than this generations releases.

On the plus side, they both sold 100% of their available units but stockholders may not see that as a positive, and consumers hoping to get their hands on one certainly don’t.  At the moment it is hard to say when you might be able to get your hands on a new console nor a new GPU or Ryzen 5000 series processor.  We will keep an eye out for you, and let you know … once we get our hands on them, of course.