However, I lucked out. I won an Auction on Yahoo! Auctions for $399.95 for the premium edition xbox 360. Mine was a special case scenario. The seller had preordered and received 4 xbox 360s. One for himself and 3 for his friends who didn’t have the money at the time of preorder. However, his friends also lacked the money come november 22nd and showed no sign of paying for them. So he sold them, at cost, on Yahoo! Auctions. Why at cost? His wife would not let him profit off of them (it was a Buy It Now only auction).

Anyways, enough about me being charmed. I figure that with the PS3 launches Xbox 360 will not go down in price all that much. The best guess for the PS3 launch right now is $399-499. Many sources seem to think that with all of the PS3’s touted capabilities (DVR, DVD burner, media hub) they might follow suit of the 360 and release 2 versions. A barebones version and the full version (remember the PSX?).

Even if Sony can match microsoft and sell at 300 and 400 Microsoft has no real reason to drop its price. They will have more games out by then and since Microsoft is loosing around $130 for each Xbox 360 sold I doubt they will want to increase that margin.

Basically, I am a consumer whore that somehow feels I got a “good” deal buying a console at full price. Oh well

But that’s why I can see the mass appeal behind it; it’s basically a cheap, awesome, gaming PC. I’m not surprised that you had all the hype about people camping out and such over there, and I can only imagine Microsoft didn’t plan these shortages, but will make them work to their benefit. For example, they most likely know PS3 won’t hit the US till April/May, and have 3 more months to snap up as many people as they can.

Sad that people will pay more than $100 from the retail price on eBay, and you’re one lucky son-of-a to get it for the retail price.

EB and Gamestop had no 360’s to sell to average Joe and those who preordered knew whether or not to even show up (they probably did anyway in a vain hope but meh).

i don’t believe the conspiracy theories for the simple matter that everyone who pre-ordered didn’t get one. think about it, if they’d just made enough to cover the pre-orders, they still sell out and they’ve got more people to say how great the console is. that many of the people who queued up over night at stores were people who had preordered and been told they’d be in the second wave, is proof to me at least that it’s a genuine shortage.

why someone would queue up all night in the freezing cold to get their 360 three weeks earlier (in the case of the pre orderers) makes little sense to me, but hey. right now i’m looking at a stack of great games on my current systems that I haven’t finished yet. in a way i’m breathing a sigh of relief. i get to spend time with the games i’m still working on, and grab the new prince of persia game with all the time to properly digest them.

since early october I’ve been buried with games, review copies and the like. this quiet is much appreciated, and i’ll get my 360 in a few weeks with all the knowledge of the game reviews and so on. the interesting thing is going to be to see how many x-box 360s microsoft can make in a week, and how long it takes before there’s units readily available on shelves.