MS says Kinect shortages are not artificial

The general manager for Xbox in the UK has denied claims that his company is deliberately managing Kinect stock shortages in an effort to drum up hype in the key Christmas shopping season.

The accusation was thrown at both Microsoft and Sony last week by US analyst Michael Pachter, who claimed that both companies would very much like for consumers to believe that their devices are highly sought after and difficult to obtain”.

Not true, according to Neil Thompson.

Anyone who actually works in the business of producing new technology, especially hardware technology, will know that these things are never managed,” he told Games Industry.

Everyone else loves to think that they’re managed, but they will know it’s not. It’s a function of coming to market with a brand new innovation and you have to scale up.

It’s absolutely not a strategy, we want to get the product into consumers hands as quickly as we can because we think it’s exciting, it’s innovative. We wanted to do that for Christmas and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve built a really strong supply and re-supply chain over the coming weeks.”

Of course, it’s also worth pointing out that MCV staff were able to find plenty of Kinect units on the UK High Street this weekend.