Xbox Exec Says Demand for Xbox Consoles is Outstripping Supply - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 08 June 2026 / 2,753 Views
The demand for Xbox consoles is currently outstripping supply, according to Xbox chief strategist officer Matthew Ball speaking during The Game Business Live. Microsoft is struggling to produce more consoles due to the higher prices and shortages for RAM and storage.
"We are producing them as quickly as possible," said Ball (via GameSpot). "These is a severe limitation to how quickly we can do that, but it’s not a question of appetite. That is a privilege as a company. It is a challenge for us to figure out."
When it comes to the impact the shortages have with the next-generation Xbox, Project Helix, Ball stated, "We are working very hard to rethink everything that we can about Helix, which is a console we are committed to shipping."
He added, "We are very cognizant of the ways in which we need the change as a company to make sure it is affordable, to make sure that it’s flexible. We are working hard to rethinking what that console model can look like, not in an exclusionary way, but in an additive way, so that as we take a look at this crisis, which may have acute effects for 2-2.5 years.
"We are working very hard to figure out the best way to navigate it or a way that works for everyone, that does not ask too much from players, but also does detract from the other investments that we need to make as a company.
"We also have tens of millions of people who we ask to spend $500 which is still an incredible sum of money. Those people that we asked to buy a console years ago, we still have an obligation to them to meet their expectations and to have them feel rewarded for which platform they chose."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Yeah, that'll happen when you intentionally strip back on manufacturing over the course of a couple of years, and just so happen to be in the middle of a global component shortage.
Which is caused by loud, water sucking data centres that won't benefit ANYONE.
But how else are chuds with no artistic talent supposed to make cartoon porn and bullshit political propaganda? Actually learn how to draw or learn how to use Photoshop again? How could you do something so cruel as to ask people who extol the Protestant Work Ethic to do actual hard work when making their slop? /s
So it went from a demand of 4 per month to 5?
6 then
lol, speaking from the UK we have to think that:
1) Sony put up prices here in the UK quite a lot and nobody can afford it anymore.
2) The Series S is much more affordable, in-fact it's the cheapest current gen console on the market here so maybe that + Forza has upped the demand a bit.
3) that new green Series X is going to sell well, and they need ram/ssd for that :)
Well there was only 1 Xbox that has been sitting in Walmarts stock for 6 months and yesterday 2 people showed up to buy it.
I call BS. I see lots of Xbox consoles (and PS5 and Switch 2 consoles) in retail all the time. I don’t think a lot of people are prioritizing vidya game hardware right now, especially now that they are all rising in price.
Nobody gonna believe this lie
Every retailer near me has their Xbox display cases full of Xbox Series X consoles. There certainly doesn't seem to be much demand here.
Did Japan go from 1600 consoles sold per month to 2000?
So what, you made 2?
Skeptical, but the demand is still probably relatively low. People want a Switch 2 or PS5. Shoot, more people globally would be willing to buy a Switch.
Asha's leadership might get another million or so units made and sold out of Xbox Series than if she didn't take over but I'm pretty sure she sees the writing is on the wall for current hardware sales. Helix is the future.
yeah true. Except the helix will probably be another failure, so it's not really the future. The future for xbox is getting as many people on game pass as possible and getting it everywhere and focusing on games so they can stop spending all this money on hardware that nobody wants.
I feel like Xbox is recovering,
It would be ideal now to release a Series S with a disc drive, and keep the current price if possible. That would counter the PS5 price rises and keep gaming more accessible.
This exec doesn't know vgchartz has weekly sales estimates. This is how much MS lies to you when they think you don't have the actual numbers. Everything numbers based that Xbox has said in the last decade has been either an outright lie or a ridiculous stretching of the truth. From gamepass being profitable to player counts to gamepass subscriber growth. It's all been either nonsense or cherry picked data. If you have barebones basic XBL you are counted as a gamepass subscriber. They purposefully merged XBL into gamepass in order to hide subscriber numbers. 1st party game dev costs weren't included in Gamepass profit data and neither was lost sales revenue. Playercounts are easy to manipulate by simply waiting for peak numbers or counting everyone who logged in once as a "player".
As an Xbox player myself, this bit of PR sounds rather fishy. Series X|S sales completely started to fall off a cliff once the "Everything is an Xbox" campaign started and they started putting their games on PS5, signaling to potential customers that they don't even need an Xbox to play Xbox games anymore, making the Xbox brand redundant.I was even considering going just with PS6 next gen if they were to have continued on that path of making everything multiplatform, but now I'll consider getting both a PS6 and Helix (although I'll still end up skipping any system next gen if they don't support physical media).
Fortunately they realized how awful of an idea that was and how important exclusives are. So maybe their recent change in strategy away from the failed "You can play every Xbox game on just about any platform" strategy that bit them in the ass has indeed caused a resurgence in demand for Xbox and they're just unable to increase production again (because you know they had to have cut production after sales collapsed). But there's no way of knowing for sure unless stores are flush with stock again, which could be hard given component shortages in the face of the tech industry's push for this "A.I." garbage, something even MS themselves have been aggressively pushing.
Then again, it's possible the damage has already been done and going back to the old status quo will do little to help the XBS even if supply was good. Now, if the Helix is reasonably priced and has must-have exclusives and a disc drive (because even on Xbox there are still a lot of people who want to own games physically), I could see Xbox recovering a bit, but they'll still be languishing in third place. There was no coming back from the PR disasters of 2013, so even if they made their best system ever the best they can hope for is decent sales. 50M would be good numbers for Xbox these days, but they'll never have a system that sells like the 360 again. They had their chance to repeat that and they blew it. Let's hope they didn't blow a chance at retaining their very viability as a hardware brand, because I do think competition is a good thing.
