Topic: The PlayStation Fan Thread

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@shadow-wolf Your confusion shall become bewilderment! I've always had a PS4 (got it on launch day) and upgraded to Pro about 6 mo before I got my X1X (got a used Pro at the time.) I also have PSVR. But, yes, I've since grown to prefer the X1 ecosystem, particularly for digital in most cases, and moved much of my PS4 library to X1 (though there's still a good 40+ games, largely JRPGs and fighters and exclusives that I can't get on X1 or Switch.) As for KH, fun fact: I've already owned the game digitally since august on PS4! Well, it's not unlocked yet but I bought that "complete edition" that included all the prior games plus 3 (before they announced "story so far" as a stand-alone.) Technically I did prefer KH3 on X1X, but I jumped into it on PS since (so far) the prior games are not coming to XBox and I prefer having large anthologies in one place. (Though I admit if story so far were announced back then I still may have bought 3 on X1 instead.)

All that said, starting around that time my PS4 Pro started beeping. Incessantly. Constantly. It's the triple-beep eject sound.....without any discs inserted. It was getting really bad, so I was checking daily for Christmas time deals on a new Pro to replace it. I was either going to get one on a deal or, if a KH3 LE came out, I'd pay full for it...because it's a KH3 LE. Lo and behold one day during my daily sweep of the internet for a Pro sale, I stumbled into that rare beast the KH3 LE....actually available for sale....and was the same price as a plain old black PS4 (and most of the other LEs are ugly to me.... red Spidey etc...I prefer a black console to match the rest of the setup.)

So, it was perfect, spend no additional money, get the only LE that really interested me, and by sheer chance, I got the only LE with a design that interests me for a game that matters to me. Perfect! And a physical copy of the game to either hang onto or sell to offset the cost of replacing the ailing PS4.

But, alas, it was not to be. Because GameStop 76 oversells, Sony under-delivers, and S-E does whatever S-E does while not building the FFXV: Royal PITA Edition.

The up-side is I had done some wire cleanup and flipped my Pro around so the front rather than back faces me when I did some pre-Christmas cleanup and moved the X1X into the console "parking lot" (it was sitting in the middle of nowhere since I got it in May) which involved switching the Pro to a normal screw-in stand instead of a clip-in stand, and re-connecting PSVR which I'd had disconnected for quite a while since I didn't want to wear out the box while playing 2D games) and somehow for a few weeks it hasn't been beeping (knock wood)....I imagine it will start again (when it gets warmer?) but the fact that the old one is working (for now) takes a little off the sting of missing the KH3 one. Still, this one will start going wonky again at some point, and then I'll have to shell out the same amount of cash for a less nice non-LE.

Unless Tsushima gets a nice LE that's neutral color like this was. Too niche though. Probably TLoU2 gets the next LE, and/or Death Stranding...and I'm not interested in either. Either way They'll make 10,000, and GS will sell 30,000 and it will be a GS exclusive

@CanisWolfred It's not mistakes. It's a business model for GS, and it's only not illegal on technicality. Yes, it's happened before. Many times (though never, ever on this scale before....they have cancelled hundreds, but never thousands like this time.) but the pattern is: It's almost always GS. Other stores have done it a few times that might be legit mistakes, but GS does it by design.

The pieces have come together a bit and it looks like what happened is this: They were given an ESTIMATE from low to high of what inventory they'd receive. They opened orders and sold to the high end of the estimate. More fun, they oversold the high end of the estimate (as they always do....expecting some cancellations, but in this case as a GS exclusive, cancellations were unlikely since people weren't ordering at multiple stores.) So they already sold more than they were getting at the high end. Then Sony delivered....the low end of the estimate.

But the fun doesn't end there.

It was supposed to be an online-only order. No "web-in-store" orders. In the AM. But many (not all) stores took "web-in-store" orders in the PM, after sales were already complete. The in-store orders pay up-front, online, you can't. So on top of overselling what was already an optimistic inventory, they DOUBLE SOLD the ones they had. And in order to avoid issuing large refunds to all the in-store orders with angry customers in person, it was easier to just mass-cancel most of the online orders that hadn't paid yet, even though they were the first orders and the only legitimate ones that were supposed to exist. As a result, the people that ordered properly seem to be about 90% cancelled. The people that ordered improperly seem to be about 90% fulfilled.

But it gets worse.

What makes this particularly bad isn't just that they colossally screwed up from top to bottom with a mix of greed and incompetence in a way only GameStop and Bethesda could manage. But the reality is this: They knew most extent of the screw-up on Dec 15. Sony's underage just exacerbates it. But they already knew they sold all the products sold to the online pre-orders to someone else after they ordered. And they told no one. They kept this thing quiet until the day after they were supposed to have shipped the orders. Up to the day before they were telling people who called in that their order was definitely secure and would be shipping out, while management had known for over a month they double sold.

It's like Nixon: How much did they know, and when did they know it.

That's the (kingdom) heart of it. If they had announced on December 20th "oops, we oversold, there was a glitch in ordering, you didn't place a preorder, sorry" it would be a non-story, they wouldn't have to bribe people's silence with $25 web-only gift cards (that dodesn't even make up for the cost for people buying a plain Pro + game), they wouldn't be dealing with blowback, most people would have taken it in stride. Oh well I got lucky with a pre-order, but it was too good to be true and they had to cancel.

But this wasn't that. They sat on it. They knew, they oversold massively over a month ago, when cancelling would not have been an outrage. They willfully lied to customers up until the day before telling them it was secured. The likely reasons for doing so are two-fold: Build "honest" false numbers for their absolutely critical Q4 earnings/Q1 projections (aka, lie to customers so you can use them to lie to your investors - nobody wins but the executive suite), and B: they are known to use the overages to extort more product from vendors. There's high odds they spent a month begging Sony: "But we already have 8000 orders we can't fulfill we need more product, you have to send more!" And after a month of playing chicken without Sony caving, up to release day, they finally had to cancel.

But it gets worse.

They are STILL lying to customers! While the Twitter post, posted later on Friday, made it clear they are not getting more, the CSRs are still instructing customers that they're working with the vendor to try to get more, and those that had the order cancelled will be the first to be notified to place a new order! I questioned the CSR on what exactly that means, and why they wouldn't just leave the orders open with an out of stock delay, and on if only those customers that previously had an order cancelled would be able to place a new order, or if once that group is "notified" and posts it on Twitter, if everyone can just place orders for that stock. After hedging and not answering the question half a dozen times, they finally said that yes, accounts that didn't have the order cancelled the first time wouldn't be able to place the order. At that point it was clear BS.

So to recap: They sold based on a high estimate, then oversold even on that estimate, then double sold what they sold with a second sales window when they shouldn't have, then took the orders away from the people that ordered correctly to give it to the supposedly unauthorized ordering customers later because it's less messy that way rather than first come first serve (the ethical way), but continued to lie directly to customers' faces about it for 5 weeks until release day, burying the truth while trying to extort quantity from Sony to cover their failure/greed, cancelled the orders without warning or explanation before having to finally post a half hearted "mea culpa" on their Twitter five hours later and then are still continuing to lie about getting more to make the angry customers go away.

I mean it only gets worse if they also refuse to refund the in-store ones that pre-paid.

This is normal for them. I ordered a wireless GCN controller in December because they were the only store with it in-stock, ships in 24h. I paid expedited shipping to get it by Christmas. After I placed the order, the next day my order showed "not available online". They finally shipped it. 10 days later. It ties with the employee model they promote of a used car lot: SELL SELL SELL! The sale comes first, figure out inventory later. If you don't have it, tell the customer you do, then keep apologizing and making them wait until you do.

I * want* to love GS....it's the only dedicated gaming store. If we lose that, there are none, it's Amazon/Target forever and ever. But they go out of their way to ensure it's impossible to want to to business with them. If it's not exclusive there's zero reason to buy there. Screwing up hardware LE preorders, their core business being preorders, is not going to help them.

Rumor says they're getting bought out by one of two hedge funds soon. Like Toys R Us and K.B. I was sad....now I'm a lot less sad. These clowns operate like a hedge fund already. And they destroyed the good games stores we used to have (EB, Babbages, Software Etc.) Plus their institutionalization of used games first is much of what pushed publishers to DRM, digital only, and the XBone fiasco (that Sony was going to also be doing with PS4 until the moment MS imploded and Sony quietly rewrote the script backstage) to begin with. I want a dedicated games store to exist. I'll be sad when their window goes empty...I like looking at it. But that's just it. I look at it. I don't spend money there.

All that being said, it's unfair to lay all blame on GS. Sony and/or S-E also owns this. Not sure which one limited the quantity to such a paltry number for a product they knew would be tremendously successful. The level of fail feels very Squeenix. But Sony really has control of production. Not sure which takes the blame, or both, but one of them is still the originator of the problem.