Two more ways to order a PS5 or Xbox Series X...

At this point, we can safely say that pre-orders are complete. I suppose it’s always bleakly possible new stocks popping up next week, but I have a feeling that any guaranteed consoles that get in our way at launch have been banned and we can remove the word “pre” from ours Lexicon here: We are now talking about orders, regular old orders. And there will be some chances of snapping up a next-gen console

The first chance is the launch day for both consoles: November 10th for Xbox Series X + S worldwide, November 12th for PS5 in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore and South Korea and November 19th for PS5 for the rest of the world.

Microsoft has been talking about having more inventory available for its next-generation consoles on launch day.

Yes, Available 11/12/2020 in-store.

— AskTarget (@AskTarget) October 13, 2020

Talk about additional launch day inventory for PS5, and here’s a note for Best Buy that is about online launch day inventory. Other retailers are likely to have either online or in-store inventory available on Launch Day, but Sony for its part has warned of extremely limited inventory. All three next-gen consoles will likely be hard to find.

Then we move to the starting area, where stocks are likely to be temporarily available from various retailers. But there’s at least one second chance that we know we’ll get: Best Buy has already announced that there will be next-generation console inventory on Black Friday, and its ad will be sent out much earlier than usual this year. We don’t have any news from other major retailers yet, but I expect at least some of them will have inventory available.

So keep this data in mind when looking for new hardware, but be aware that these things will be a bit hard to find for you. This goes perfectly for granted, but if I had to guess I would expect PS5 bottlenecks to last longer than Xbox bottlenecks. After all, if you want one, you can get one. But it can take a while.