Microsoft has taken a thinly-veiled dig at the chaos that was PS5's surprise pre-order debacle, promising to reveal the exact time Xbox one will go live soon.
It's probably fair to say that the PS5 Showcase event on Wednesday night was a success. It opened with Final Fantasy 16, gave Harry Potter gamers something to get excited about via Hogwarts Legacy, and closed with the information everyone wanted to know about, the price. A regular PS5 will cost $499 and the digital edition will cost $399.
It's after the showcase came to an end that chaos ensued. PlayStation bosses promised months ago that it would not spring pre-orders on its potential customers unexpectedly. That's why it made sense that there was no mention of it during the showcase itself. The reveal from Geoff Keighly after the fact that they would go live the following morning would not have sat well with a lot of people.
Things got even more chaotic when Walmart decided it didn't want to wait until Thursday morning. The retailer tweeted "make you wait to get the new #PlayStation5? Nah, that's not like us. Go on, preorder it NOW!" That sent the internet into a frenzy and started a domino effect. Target and Amazon followed suit, as did Best Buy and GameStop. By the end of the night, thousands of hopeful PlayStation fans had spent hours in virtual queues, many of them with nothing to show for their wasted evening.
Xbox's various reveals went off with far fewer hiccups despite going down a week earlier than planned. In fact, it decided to take a thinly-veiled shot at the PS5 pre-order madness via a tweet about its own pre-order plan. It reiterated that pre-orders for the Series X and Series S will go live on September 22, 2020. The dig at PlayStation came in the form of the tweet's ending, "don’t worry - we’ll let you know the exact time pre-orders start for you soon."
PS5's pre-order problems are another element of this next-gen console war that will benefit the sales of the Series X and Series S. Many of those who were on the fence and failed to land a PS5 pre-order this week might throw their hands up and go for an Xbox next week instead. In a battle where PlayStation was always going to be leading the way, it continues to feel like Xbox is making up a lot of ground.
Source: Xbox