I know this isn’t entirely 343’s fault, but I really want to hear something from them to know that they at least care and know about this issue and are HOPEFULLY doing something to fix it, especially as the holiday season is coming.
The Problem:
Pre-orders for the Halo Infinite Limited Edition Xbox are impossible to get right now! A lot of us have gone through the motions of refreshing, clearing caches, having credit cards ready, all to see unresponsive pages. I just personally spent 2 hours trying to deal with GameStop because their website, twitter, and customer service were all saying different things about stock, and although I was online on my pro account at the time, got absolutely no pre-order button for the “super bundle”. I purchased their pro service just for this in hopes that it would give me a chance against the bots to get the new console. I unfortunately missed the announcement of the console back in August because of school so I had no way of even trying to get the console from Microsoft, Target, and Walmart on that first day. There also seems to be very vague announcements on when/if restocks occur online so all in all I think it’s pretty fair to say this is all a TERRIBLE system for the consumer and for Halo Fans. The only way to buy the limited items now is to buy them off e-bay for double or triple the retail price. I get it, I do understand these are supposed to be LIMITED items but I don’t believe you guys at 343 were wanting the majority of these items to be ending up in the hands of scalpers and the most wealthy members of the community.
Proposed Solution:
I’ll be honest, I have no idea how this works in terms of 343/Microsoft and how much power they have in telling retailers how to sell their products, but I really wonder why this can’t be done in person? Why can’t I walk into a retailer to get a pre-order? The product would definitely still sell out anyways, but it would be to people who are actual fans of the series/game and want to own the bit of halo history. Why can’t there be order caps to one per person to give more people a shot? Even if these rules were only placed for like a week/weekend, I at least believe this would give the community a shot over the bots. I understand that it is too much right now to curb bots, so I really believe pushing for in-person preorders would benefit a larger piece of the community.
Conclusion:
Can 343 or Microsoft please address this to some extent besides the vague tweets/product updates? At least, if the system is not going to change, can we get some idea of how many units are left to be sold and when? I am a huge Halo fan and can’t wait for Infinite, but I think it’s very unreasonable to be getting notified only when the product is gone and by random twitter accounts. The bots are not going anywhere so I really am hoping change can start from maybe the studio itself to end this madness by the scalpers.