If you're one of the many who's attempting to acquire either the Xbox Series X or the Xbox Series S, you may have noticed that it's been nearly impossible. Pretty much every online or brick-and-mortar store has been picked dry, with many of them turning away potential buyers. To be blunt, it hasn't been pretty out there.
According to Microsoft, it looks that this trend may continue for quite some time. Xbox Chief Financial Officer Tim Stuart says that finding an Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S in stores will be nigh impossible, and it could be well into 2021 before you can purchase either of the newest Xbox consoles.
"I think we'll continue to see supply shortages as we head into the post-holiday quarter, so Microsoft's Q3, [or] calendar Q1. And then when we get to Q4, all of our supply chain continuing to go full speed heading into kind of the pre-summer months," said Stuart during the Jefferies Interactive Entertainment Virtual Conference.
To further complicate the issue, Xbox consoles that weren't sold as pre-orders were quickly gobbled up by scalpers using bots as a way to score a quick dollar during the upcoming shopping holiday. The popular online auction site eBay is full of Xbox Series X and Xbox Series X consoles, many of which are being sold for two to three times the official MSRP. On that note, I know it's tempting to pay extra to score a console, but please don't encourage the practice by purchasing a scalped unit.
But don't think for a moment that Microsoft is the only company that's feeling the low-stock blues. Sony is experiencing the same problem and is struggling to keep the PlayStation 5 in stock. Sony has gone on record that the PS5 will not be sold in stores, with Best Buy chiming in that it doesn't expect to see either the next-gen Xbox or PlayStation consoles in stores until 2021. Not even the GPU giant, Nvidia, is immune to this, as all its newest graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3090, and RTX 3070, have been sold out since release.