release

Why, in the prime of the pre-holiday gift-buying season, is it still nearly impossible to find an Xbox360? Kotaku has the scoop.

Rumor 1: Last week Microsoft began denying a recall rumor that wasn’t circulating. Many of the blogs run by Msoft employees carried the same sort of denial: Despite what you hear, we’re not doing a recall.

Sure enough, a few days after the denial, the rumors hit. It wasn’t a recall, they said, but in fact an internal recall. Some say that a bad batch of 360s were caught shortly after manufacture and pulled before they could hit stores. The catch, a good thing, led to severe and unexpected shortages, a bad thing.

Rumor 2: Employees at retail game stores are not using their entire shipments to fulfill pre-orders, instead they are buying some of the 360s themselves and turning around to auction them off on eBay. A very intriguing, though close to impossible rumor to prove.

Neither possible answer is very satisfying, and both are bad news. Either way, it’s still a colossal failure on Microsoft’s part and puts any hopes of grabbing market share in siginificant peril. You can’t gain market share if no one can buy your product, genuises.