Refresh, Refresh, Refresh: My Xbox Series X Launch Day Survival Notes

So yesterday was the big day. Xbox Series X and Series S officially went on sale, $499 for the big black monolith one and $299 for the little digital-only Series S, and I spent roughly four hours of my life doing something I havent done since ticket-buying for a concert in 2009: refreshing a product page over and over like it owed me money.

I did not get a console. I want to say that up front so this doesnt read like a victory lap. What I did get was a pretty thorough education in how badly the whole stock-tracking process is set up right now, and a handful of things I'm going to do differently for whatever the next round of restocks looks like (and there will be more rounds, because demand is nowhere close to being met).

The problem isnt supply, its visibility

Retailers are getting units in. Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Microsoft's own store, GameStop even though nobody trusts GameStop's site not to fall over. The issue is nobody tells you when the page goes live until its already sold out, and by the time a human being sees a tweet about it, clicks through, and gets to checkout, some bot has already had the item in a cart for six minutes. Ive read enough about this over the last few weeks to know the bots arent even that sophisticated, they're just fast, and fast beats clever every time when the whole game is milliseconds.

A friend of mine (works in ad tech, definitely not a criminal mastermind) told me some of these resale groups on Discord are running scripts that hit fifteen retailer endpoints simultaneously and auto-checkout the second inventory flips to available. Then the console shows up on eBay two hours later for $850. Thats a $351 markup on a Series X, before shipping. Its gross, honestly, and I dont care how "thats just the market" people want to frame it, scalping a gaming console during a pandemic when people are stuck at home looking for something to do with their kids is a genuinely lousy thing to do for a profit margin.

What actually helped (a little)

A few things did make yesterday less miserable than it could have been:

Twitter stock alert accounts. There are a handful of accounts that do nothing but scrape retailer APIs and tweet the second something goes live. Turn on notifications for a couple of these, mute everything else, and you get maybe a 30-60 second head start over just doomscrolling and hoping.
Multiple tabs, multiple retailers, already logged in. This sounds obvious but I hadnt done it going in. Have Best Buy, Target, and Walmart all open, already signed into your account, payment info saved, so you're not fumbling through a login screen while the clock runs out. I lost one window purely because I had to type my password.
Skip the cart page mentality. A lot of these sites let you go straight from "add to cart" to a simplified checkout if you're already logged in with one-click enabled. Digging around in account settings for that beforehand is worth the ten minutes.
Dont bother with GameStop's site during a drop. I say this with love. It just falls over. Every single time.

None of this got me a console. What it got me was slightly less far back in a queue that, realistically, several thousand bots were already ahead of me in anyway.

The stuff that actually sounds good, from a distance

Assuming I eventually get my hands on one, the parts of Series X I'm most curious about are Quick Resume, which is supposed to let you suspend and jump between like four games instantly instead of sitting through load screens, and the backward compatibility work theyve done, apparently some Xbox One and even Xbox 360 titles get an automatic frame rate bump on the new hardware just by existing there. No patch required. That's a neat trick if it actually holds up outside of a press release.

The one thing that already has me annoyed and I havent even owned the console yet: the official 1TB expansion storage card is $219.99. For a storage card. That is more than I paid for my entire first hard drive back when I built my first PC, and it plugs into a proprietary slot so you cant just grab whatever SSD is cheapest that week. I get it, custom form factor, proprietary speed requirements, blah blah. It still stings.

Anyway. If you're also out there refreshing tabs at midnight, solidarity. Try the Twitter alert accounts. Skip GameStop. And maybe don't hold your breath for Black Friday being any easier, because if anything I'd bet its worse.