In a way, Microsoft should be thankful for Elden Ring. People tend to say drought this and that. In exclusive term, you can say that is the case, but all it takes is a big game, multilplatform or not, to draw great attention. Since it’s hard to grab PS5 or even 4, people will seek for another option and Series S is there to say, “Buy me!” Series X comes in shortly later to get more buyers. From there on, they can introduce their perks, including Game Pass, Quick Resume, etc.
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Hope stock becomes readily available from now on but if I didn’t have a Series X and I was planning on upgrading later this year with Starfield I would probably take the safer road and buy one now instead because who knows if stock becomes harder to find again.
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As long as Microsoft beats the drum for Startfield marketing, the game is gonna be huge.
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There’s definitely hype among the big Bethesda fans like me but Elden Ring was something else, the Elden Ring subreddit for example had over 400K followers before the release of the game, it felt like the entire Souls community was awaiting for this and then the game far surpassed expectations at release so it ended up becoming popular even among the mainstream but Elden Ring IMO is a new IP only in name, the gameplay is basically an evolution of Dark Souls while Starfield is brand new IP for Bethesda in terms of everything from gameplay and even a renewed engine so most people don’t know what to expect yet while we knew more or less what to expect from a Fromsoft game.
Some say Skyrim in space and others Fallout in space but besides the open world nature I don’t think they will be that similar.
Yeah I’m kinda thankful that there isn’t an Xbox exclusive out now tbh thanks to Elden Ring, only really something like a new Halo, Bethesda game or CDPR could take me away from Elden Ring right now, Elden Ring is a game that will last me until the summer, just so good.
I don’t think so. Starfield have pretty much similar gameplay as any other Bethesda title. Yeah, they will bring back the features they cut from the game, but other than than - as soon as you start playing you will say “Yeah, that’s Bethesda game”
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Yeah the Bethesda charm will definitely be there 
Good point, I hadn’t thought about subreddit follows as an indication of hype but Elden Ring definitely has Starfield beat in that regard! Maybe Starfield will pick up before launch when we get some gameplay footage and some (hopefully) positive reviews and impressions.
That there’s still a lot of anticipation for the game when we still haven’t really seen anything of it is a good sign, though, and if they nail the marketing I can still see this rivalling some of the bigger sellers of the year.
I believe GRRMartin’s fans also contributed to that.
Yeah once they show the game this summer and the marketing begins you will see a lot of hype and online communities will have a lot of growth, Todd Howard is amazing when it comes to marketing his games too but it’s possible that after Fallout 76 a lot of people will be hesitant and won’t fall for any marketing hype until the game comes out, the thing with Fromsoft is they were coming off games that were received very positively and in many people’s eyes Elden Ring was the sequel for DS4 (It is a spiritual sequel) DS3 was a 10 million seller that was very loved by the Dark Souls community too, even that subreddit has 500K followers, if you look around you will see that most of Bethesda’s games also have huge followings online, with the Fallout 4,76, Skyrim etc all having 400K+ and Skyrim even 1M+ followers on reddit, I’m not basing all the hype around reddit of course but it can be an indication, Cyberpunk’s subreddit had similar numbers before launch too.
I think it was mostly the anticipation of a Dark Souls sequel, with Dark Souls 3 the last Souls game coming out 6 years ago there was a lot of hype for another Souls game, Fromsoft having a very good track record, most open world games becoming stale the last couple of years and Elden Ring being a breath of fresh air in this genre and very different from other open world games and also a perfect release date with 0 competition and the other open world game that came out around the same time paling in comparison to Elden Ring, it was the perfect combination for a huge success.
Also Elde Ring is perfect for streaming, it’s always hilarious seeing streamers play the Souls games so it gets that easy free marketing too on top of being a great game.
Series X is still in stock via Walmart and Sam’s Club online.
Microsoft still has bundles up for order.
Really interested to see their sales charts and how it’s ramped.
I wonder why they decided to do it this month. Would make more sense if some new games were released, or last year when Elden Ring was released. Would be cool if they had this amount of stock for the whole year.
If they got increased manufacturing capacity at the beginning of the year (my assumption), maybe it takes a few months to build, test, and distribute consoles.
All my assumptions though lol.
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Yeah, I also believe this increase is going to be sustained for the whole year at least, I’m sure they want Starfield to explode on gamepass.
Another take with a grain of salt the size of an iceberg, but these are the numbers released by Vgchartz for the week ending March 26
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This month is Microsoft earning call. It should be interesting to learn more on the console and supply.
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If those numbers are accurate it probably means that Xbox sent most of it’s stock to the US just before Microsoft’s earning call, from what I’ve been following Xbox’s sales haven’t been so one sided to NA and they were selling around 3K a week in Japan and I was seeing better sales than those in Europe too, I wonder if this is them trying to take back the US by sending most of their stock here while they can and now that the Xbox Series and PS5 are pretty much neck and neck in the US, would be great for the brand to take back the US, the 360 dominated the 7th gen by US domination alone, it is by far the most important market.
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Tax (refund) season, for the US at least.
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So the Series X has been in stock at the MS store in Australia for 2 hours 
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Is there any indication how long this chip shortage will last?
Intel thinks we might be looking at 2023 for it to ease, there are a lot of new fabs being built as we speak in places like the US. The war in Ukraine though is impacting the chip shortage because of the neon they make, apparently 50% of the worlds usage.
I would say it is easing a bit now but I probably won’t expect it to end till 2023 or even early 2024, just have a look at GPU prices though they have come down a lot so that is a good sign, though there could be other factors in that.
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