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Xbox One X Sales Rocket Amid Xbox Series X Preorders

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There's going to be a lot of disappointed people this holiday season.

The Xbox Series X went up for pre-order today, but if Amazon's sales ranking charts are to believed, there may be a lot of people getting the wrong console this holiday season.

Nintendeal founder Andrew Wolf, under the Twitter handle @AndrewAlerts, found that the Xbox One X, Microsoft's most powerful console last generation, had skyrocketed on Amazon's sales charts under "Movers & Shakers in Video Games."

As of this writing, the Xbox One X is up 431% to a rank of 317, though Wolf saw it as high as 747%. And that begs the question, did people buy the wrong console on Amazon among the pre-order confusion? The two product names are a single word apart, and each could be listed with the same 1TB storage configuration. In a search for Xbox Series X (the new console), the Xbox One X (the old console) does still come up, both as new and renewed systems. Microsoft discontinued the Xbox One X in July, but it's possible there's still stock out there.

It's possible that some potential buyers wouldn't notice the difference, especially if they're not usually big into video games. The new Xbox Series S also has a similar name to the current Xbox One S.

 Tom's Hardware has reached out to Amazon about the situation and will update if it responds.

 The new and old consoles' names, and whether they are confusing, has been brought up before, and some people in forums and on Twitter have debated whether there are truly any issues at all. But if this many people bought the last-gen Xbox on the pre-order day? Well, then there's probably something to it.

Andrew E. Freedman
Andrew E. Freedman

Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and BlueSky @andrewfreedman.net. You can send him tips on Signal: andrewfreedman.01

9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • digitalgriffin
    Don't laugh but I saw this coming a mile away.

    There's going to be lots of pissed parents when the mistake is realized after their kid breaks open the box and realizes it's the wrong console. Once it's been opened you can't return it.
    Reply
  • ThisIsMe
    Hopefully it was just a bunch of incorrectly programmed bots.
    Reply
  • cia1413
    ThisIsMe said:
    Hopefully it was just a bunch of incorrectly programmed bots.
    I tried to order a series s from amazon for a bit. There is no way to find the listing by searching for it in the amazon search it just shows you 37 different models of the one s. I bet all of them are real people.
    Reply
  • agentbb007
    Amazon should send all of these orders a confirmation email reminding them they didn’t buy the next gen console.
    Reply
  • jkflipflop98
    I mean, it's about the dumbest, most confusing name you could come up with. I had to read the headline three times to figure out the problem here.
    Reply
  • bigdragon
    I'm a gamer, and I found Microsoft's naming to be confusing! I'm sure there's a lot of confused normal people out there too. Series X/S is way too similar to One X/S. Search engines also try to be helpful and make assumptions about the wrong product. Microsoft shouldn't have reused the X and S -- they should have gone to A and B or something similarly distinguishable.
    Reply
  • husker
    Microsoft whipped IBM in the O.S. war(Windows NT vs. IBM Warp) because IBM made things unnecessarily confusing for the user, even though Warp was arguably better than Windows NT at the time. Seems now Microsoft is going the way of IBM. Sad thing is, there are MULTIPLE people getting 6 and 7 figure salaries at MS to come up with and approve this ridiculous Xbox naming debacle. By the way, if someone says "The Xbox one" in a conversation do you know for sure if they don't mean the original Xbox ? Way to misuse the conventional use of the English language, Microsoft. I can't wait until 2024 when we have the Xbox Series 360 One.
    Reply
  • Shadowclash10
    husker said:
    Microsoft whipped IBM in the O.S. war(Windows NT vs. IBM Warp) because IBM made things unnecessarily confusing for the user, even though Warp was arguably better than Windows NT at the time. Seems now Microsoft is going the way of IBM. Sad thing is, there are MULTIPLE people getting 6 and 7 figure salaries at MS to come up with and approve this ridiculous Xbox naming debacle. By the way, if someone says "The Xbox one" in a conversation do you know for sure if they don't mean the original Xbox ? Way to misuse the conventional use of the English language, Microsoft. I can't wait until 2024 when we have the Xbox Series 360 One.
    Right. It isn't just the One X and One S, its the original One too. TBF, there's also a PS4, PS4 Pro, and PS4 Slim - which is very bad. But, I feel like there's a much easier distinguishment to be made between the PS4 and PS5 than a One X and Series X.
    Reply
  • sizzling
    I am not surprised at all. I will admit when I saw this I did go and check my own pre order. I had been very surprised that is was easy to find a site still taking orders a good 12+ hours after release and it made me wonder if somehow I picked the wrong one.

    Hopefully some parents might realise when they not only pay too little for the series X but it also turns up in the next week and not on the 10th November.
    Reply