During the last Xbox Live’s Major Nelson of 2020, Phil Spencer talked about the struggles of Xbox to meet the demand of Xbox Series X|S and how the company will attempt to reduce the forecasted shortages of next-gen hardware in the next four months.
The executive and head of Microsoft’s Xbox team took the opportunity to reassure fans that the company is “working as hard as we can” to meet the demand of customers, to achieve the goal, AMD has been asked to increase the production of processors for the next-gen hardware.
“I get some people [asking], ‘why didn’t you build more? Why didn’t you start earlier? Why didn’t you ship them earlier?’ All of those things,” Spencer told Hyrb. “It’s really just down to physics and engineering. We’re not holding them back: we’re building them as fast as we can. We have all the assembly lines going. I was on the phone last week with Lisa Su at AMD [asking], ‘how do we get more?’ So it’s something that we’re constantly working on.”
Spencer who previously warned about the catastrophic impact of COVID-19 to be seen in 2021 is now facing a complicated situation in which Xbox and PlayStation are manufactured by the same AMD architecture, the allocation of processors and GPU is something that it’s not clearly discussed by AMD, it’s possible that Xbox, a company who is trailing PlayStation in sales did not have the upper hand in AMD’s allocation.
Xbox Series X|S managed to sell all its pre-orders in Japan, the console also sold well in North America, but sadly for Microsoft, the company could not meet the huge demand for the console, something that may have led to the disappointing sales of the system when compared to Nintendo Switch and PS5.
On a more positive note, Spencer also expressed his enthusiasm for the future of Xbox Game Pass:
“We look at Game Pass today and it’s, what, three years old? And the numbers that we’re hitting, the engagement, the way that creators are now targeting Game Pass – we get people from their original idea of a game coming to us and saying ‘hey, we’d like this to be a Game Pass game and can you work with us on that?’, which is just fantastic.”
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