Microsoft Is Trying To Ramp Up Xbox Series X/S Production, Phil Spencer Says

The Xbox Series X and Series S systems have been extremely difficult to find since they launched in November, and stock hasn’t improved much at the major retailers. However, head of Xbox Phil Spencer said he’s taken some steps to ensure the console will be more plentiful soon. It’s unclear how soon “soon” is, but the issues affecting Microsoft are likely similar to the ones affecting Sony.

Talking to Xbox Live’s “Major Nelson” Larry Hryb on his podcast (via VGC), Spencer explained that Microsoft has been making new consoles as quickly as possible, but he’s also working with their production partners to further increase output. This includes AMD, which creates the system’s GPU and CPU. The Switch is the only major system to not use AMD for these components, relying instead on Nvidia.

“It really is just down to physics and engineering. We’re not holding them back,” Spencer said. “We’re building them as fast as we can. We have all the assembly lines going. I was on the phone last week with Lisa Su at AMD [asking], ‘How do we get more? How do we get more?’ So it’s something that we’re constantly working on, but it’s not just us. I think gaming has really come into its own in 2020.”

We’ve seen sporadic restocks of the Xbox Series X and Series S at places like Walmart and Best Buy since their initial release, and these will hopefully become more frequent as Microsoft is able to speed up production. Sony is having extremely high demand for the PS5, as well, and it also makes use of an AMD Radeon RDNA 2 style GPU. Because of this, bottlenecks for one company likely affect the other. The pandemic surely hasn’t helped matters, but we should hopefully see more stock early this year as the early adopters no longer rush to secure their system.

For help tracking down an Xbox Series X|S, check out our restock guide. It has updates from every major retailer so you can have the best shot of ordering a system soon.

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