Where Are the Xbox 360s?

What's the hold-up, ask Goldman Sachs.

It may seem obvious inside your local game store lately, but things aren't going as well with Microsoft's Xbox 360 launch as it could have. Piddling early shipments of the next-gen console were followed up by thinner trickles in the weeks afterwards, and now analysts are wondering why we're in this predicament.

Get a move on, say the analysts.

"Xbox 360, what's the hold-up?" asks Rick Sherlund, an analyst at US firm Goldman Sachs.

Sherlund says his numbers point to Microsoft currently rolling around 600,000 to 800,000 consoles a month of the production line, according to a report at business site Forbes. Despite problems satisfying demand, Microsoft is adamant that it'll meet its own target of 3 million Xbox 360s sold in the first 90 days.

Worrying for the company, it doesn't seem to be able to have enough consoles coming and the crucial Christmas period, when most games are sold, has slipped by.

"It is clear that something disrupted the supply of Xbox 360 shipments [this autumn], and there does not appear to be any end of year catch-up in shipments," said Sherlund.

According to top Microsoft executives, that "something" is a slowdown in chip supplies, but some have instead pointed to the final assembly stages as the bottleneck. Whatever the problem, Microsoft will be working at fixing it soon, as both its console rivals have their new machines in the wings.

More bad news for the company is that those who went into stores this Christmas looking for an Xbox 360 and came up empty did not decide to go with the original instead. Sherlund says Xbox game sales "may have fallen off more quickly" than anyone had thought they would.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games