Microsoft is rumoured to have allocated 300,000 Xbox's to the European market for launch, which is not expected to be anywhere near enough. It is expected that at least that many have already been pre-ordered, and even sites like Amazon are instigating a one Xbox per customer rule.
It seems that there are going to be a lot of disappointed customers over the festive season, especially as it is unlikely that many more of the hotly anticipated devices are going to be available until at least January 2006. Pre-ordered Xbox's are already trading on eBay for twice their retail value, which goes to show just how much gamers want these new consoles.
The question of course is, is it worth it? For many across Europe, the answer is probably no. It has been widely accepted in the review community that whilst the Xbox 360 is a tremendous leap forward in terms of graphics capability, the new hardware is really only worth purchasing if a user already owns a High Definition capable TV. Running the Xbox 360 on a standard definition TV just doesn't show off the new system to it's fullest capabilities, and it's likely that users buying the new console will be disappointed if they don't have the hardware to take advantage of it. As well as that, the games that come out with the console at launch are unlikely to be utilising the multithreaded system to it's full.
Still, the Xbox 360 is the only next generation console on the market at the moment, so any argument about it not being worth it will fall on deaf ears, particularly over the festive season. Microsoft can only hope that their tactic of making the console hard to get doesn't turn consumers against them. We'll have to wait for the sales figures before we can make any conclusions, but we don't think Sony can be written off yet. Interesting times are ahead.
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