360 Shortage Rumours Marketing Ploy? 28
Joystiq wonders out loud if the shortage rumours going around about the Xbox 360 may not just be a marketing ploy on Microsoft's part. From the article: "The bottom line: in all likelihood, you'll be able to walk into just about any store on November 22nd and obtain an Xbox 360. But all it takes is a little, good, old-fashioned FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) to drive sales through the roof and make this rumor a self-fulfilling prophecy." If this is in fact a ploy, it may be backfiring on them. Gamasutra is reporting that an analyst is downgrading his opinion of how the launch will go based on these hardware shortage rumours.
Re:Ha.y (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure you really understand how this works. MS can say whatever they want; they can say they expect to sell one single unit and then afterwards claim they beat expectations by 1.5 million percent. But analysts don't base their expectations on what manufacturers say. They never have and they never will.
Analysts do their own research. They literally will do things like call up the factories involved in producing the various parts required and asking them how many units they can produce in a month. If necessary, they'll visit said factories to look at the assembly lines themselves. Sub-contractors are usually public corporations themselves so they have to publish stuff like manufacturing capacities, and it's not hard for an analyst to independently verify these numbers. (And they do require verification; the fact that a factory turned out 15 million doorstops last year does not mean it will also be able to turn out 1.5 million Xbox 360 outer casings by the end of November.)
They'll do this for everything; packaging, materials, assembly infrastructure, delivery logistics.
That's on the supply side.
To determine demand, they'll also survey stores to get a sense of the number of preorders in various regions, and with a large enough sample size they can extrapolate that nationally. They'll do their own cold-calling too, random phone or other surveys of end-users, and/or more targeted focus groups and surveys geared just to people of a certain age or who identify themselves as gamers.
There are also laws that govern how these analysts can function; they can be accused of orchestrating or participating in pump and dump schemes just like the companies themselves.
The point being, if an analyst downgrades something like this, it's because he/they knows something we don't and that maybe even MS doesn't want us to know. It's not something that can be orchestrated by MS. In this case, there are probably a few weak links in the supply chain - it doesn't sound like it's the demand that's being downgraded, just the supply. And he even says it's probably not going to affect MS at all in the long run.
I'm not convinced that you won't be able to walk into a store and buy an Xbox 360 at or soon after launch, though, but day one and immediately afterwards, you will probably have to hunt. They're not going to have 3 million systems out there if analysts believe they'll only have half that.