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Xbox Series X and S preorders went live this morning right on time, as Microsoft announced they would. At least, they did in some places. For some people. As long as you weren’t stuck in a queue, or told it was sold out when it seemingly was not. Well, at least Amazon had pictures of cute dogs to keep you company.

Predictably, Xbox preorders were a shitshow, demonstrating for the third time in a short span (after the RTX 3080 and PS5) that retailer websites just aren’t equipped to deal with this level of heavy demand. Microsoft appears to have done what it could, announcing that preorders would go live at a specified time so that people could be prepared, rather than giving bots the opportunity to scrape everything up as they went live. But everyone knowing exactly when preorders would begin also ensured the maximum amount of traffic to all of these websites, and none of them seem to have handled it particularly well.

For starters, neither Amazon nor Best Buy had their preorders available right at 8 AM PT. That may have meant you were stuck frustratingly refreshing those pages, expecting them to be live any second, when you could have been spending your time frustratingly refreshing pages on Walmart, Target, and the Xbox Store, where there were consoles to place orders on right away.

Much like with PS5 last week, it was a crapshoot: Maybe you’d get an order through, maybe you wouldn’t. Either way, you were likely faced with numerous messages claiming that systems were sold out, even as orders for other people were getting through. The lesson in these situations, clearly, is to never trust what a retailer’s website claims about the stock situation and mash the checkout and refresh buttons over and over and over until something happens. I gave up trying to preorder at Best Buy after countless failures to do so, only to have luck placing an order after I saw that someone else had managed to get one through.

As eager would-be buyers failed at one retailer or another, seemingly everyone rushed to whatever store opened its preorders next–Sam’s Club, then Amazon, then Best Buy. That further ensured that these websites would be dealing with a heavy load, continuing the trend of false “sold out” notifications, consoles being inexplicably removed from carts, and so on. Amazon was the closest thing to a smooth ride, but there was no telling when its preorders would actually start. And now, it looks as if they’re sold out at most retailers.

After GameStop’s website collapsed during PS5 preorders, this time around, visitors to the site were met with a queue and told not to reload. That seemed like a sensible solution, but as some found out, that queue didn’t function properly: People got through by opening the site in a second browser after already sitting in the queue, and the queue page itself was automatically refreshing itself.

All of this was to be expected, but it still made for a hugely frustrating experience no matter which store you turned to or whether or not you actually got one. And those who do will be spending the next few days or weeks worried that their preorder might either be canceled or not show up on launch day.

Sony’s PS5 preorder situation was worse than this because there was no advance notice or real warning regarding how it would work. Microsoft capitalized on that to cheekily highlight that people would know when Xbox preorders would start. Sony apologized for how it handled things, and while Microsoft might have positioned all of this better from the start, the end result was still a mess. Scalpers are already taking to eBay to turn a profit on their luck, further ensuring that–if you didn’t get one on your own–you walk away from the experience with a bad taste in your mouth.

Ultimately, all of this will be forgotten. Like online servers for a game crashing at launch, once things are smoothed out and working as expected, the annoyance of times like this will fade away. (Microsoft is attributing this all to strong demand, which might be even stronger after the Bethesda acquisition.) But in the meantime, many are going to walk away feeling like their time was wasted.

Developer Arkane Studios is hiring for some unannounced AAA title. This comes not long after the Dishonored and Prey creator was scooped up by Microsoft, along with other ZeniMax Media studios for $7.5 billion.

According to a Twitter thread by user MauroNL3, a number of positions are open at Arkane’s Austin, Texas and Lyon, France locations. The availabilities run the gamut from character animation engineer and engine programmer to systems designer and tools programmer. Many of the positions hint at what Arkane plans to work on next.

The graphics engineer position in Austin is looking for someone with Unreal Engine 4 familiarity, signaling a possible engine change for the studio. Most of Arkane’s games, with the exception of Prey, run on a form of id Tech, a proprietary engine developed by id Software.

Arkane’s next game could also feature some form of online multiplayer, as well as live-service elements akin to Destiny 2 or Fortnite. The senior gameplay engineer role states that someone with “expertise with network and online features” would be a plus but is not required, while the studio also wants a server engineer with “experience in a ‘Live’ environment (ongoing support of product after launch).”

Deathloop, a first-person shooter about an assassin stuck in a time loop, is Arkane Studios’ next announced game and launches next year on PC and PlayStation 5.

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We all have a lot of fun here talking about video games and movies and occasionally Lego Baby Yodas, but there’s one thing that’s no laughing matter: democracy. The United States election is coming up, and today is National Voter Registration Day. The holiday (of sorts) is a reminder to make sure you’re registered to vote in November.

“But where do I start?” you may ask. I’m so glad you did! The National Voter Registration Day site has all the information and resources you need to check your voter registration in your state or territory. If you aren’t registered, you can go straight from there to the correct registration link, or even request a mail-in ballot. Registering to vote is important, because without a proper registration you may not be able to vote in November.

But don’t just listen to me, listen to important people like these celebrities.

If the combined power of Deadpool, T-Swift, and TV’s Mariska Hargitay don’t convince you, frankly I’m not sure what will.

In all seriousness, voting is important. It’s the most direct tool citizens have to interact with and influence their government. Representative government relies on you to show up and have a voice, and registering to vote is a quick, painless first step to participating in a system that reflects your beliefs and values. Register now, vote in November.

Attack on Titan fans finally have confirmation about the upcoming fourth season. Funimation announced that the Attack on Titan final season sub and dub will be available on its streaming service later this year. The subtitled episodes will stream day and date with its Japanese broadcast in the US, Canada, the UK, and Ireland.

While no date has been announced, Funimation has released an official trailer for the upcoming season, which you can watch below.

Animation studio MAPPA replaced Attack on Titan’s original studio, WIT, for work on the final season. With the MAPPA takover, Jun Shishido and Yuichiro Hayashi replaced Tetsuro Araki and Masashi Koizuka as chief director and series director, respectively. MAPPA is the studio responsible for hit Yuri on Ice, on which Shishido was the chief director, as well as other well-known series like Hajime no Ippo and Kakegurui.

For those who want to get caught up before the new season hits Funimation, Seasons 1-3 are currently available both subbed and dubbed on the streaming service.

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The CW’s sprawling DC superhero universe, the Arrowverse, is about to get a little smaller. Supergirl will be ending its run with Season 6, which is scheduled to premiere next year, GameSpot has confirmed. This is the second Arrowverse series to conclude following the franchise’s titular Arrow, which ended after 8 seasons earlier this year.

The show’s final season will include 20 episodes and will likely arrive at some point in the midseason of 2021, although no premiere date has been set. Production is scheduled to begin later this month.

In an Instagram post, Benoist offered a comment, saying that portraying the character has been “an honor” and has “taught [her] strength [she] didn’t know [she] had.”

Supergirl first launched on CBS back in 2015, but made the jump to The CW beginning with Season 2. There, it was able to join its fellow Arrowverse shows like Flash and Legends of Tomorrow for a more cohesive shared universe. Benoist has since co-starred in universe-wide crossover events to bring her character from her alternate Earth to the newly created “Earth-Prime” alongside heroes like Barry Allen and the late Oliver Queen.

In addition to Benoist’s Supergirl, the show also introduced a host of other adapted DC characters to the Arrowverse, including Lena Luthor (Katie McGrath), the half-sister of the infamous Lex, and Martian Manhunter (David Harewood) a shapeshifting alien. It is unclear what the show’s end will mean for the ensemble, or if any of the supporting cast members will find themselves involved in the other Arrowverse-connected shows. Certainly with all the time-traveling and universe hopping, there is more than enough space for more familiar faces to start cropping up if and when the time comes.

Supergirl Season 6 is slated to air in 2021.

Microsoft’s announcement that its next generation would be called Xbox Series X and Series S got some amount of ribbing–what if people confuse it with the current-gen Xbox One X and One S? Now as the console preorders go live, there’s at least some indication that the naming scheme is leading to mistaken purchases.

According to Amazon’s “Movers & Shakers” chart in the video games category, Xbox One X sales are up 431% as of the time of writing. These kinds of percentage-based charts can be misleading, but that kind of sudden surge at least suggests that some consumers may be buying the system by mistake, intending to preorder the next-gen console. This is speculation, however, so we can’t make definitive conclusions.

There is no similar surge for Xbox One S on the charts. If product confusion were at issue it seems that may be happening too, as customers mistake the One S for the similarly named Series S.

Microsoft, for its part, is trying to simplify the whole idea of generations by emphasizing its consoles as simply Xbox, with the different series acting as model names like phones. That also appears to be a big reason for its Smart Delivery push, to simplify the end-user experience without a lot of futzing over different console configurations.

Meanwhile, the preorders for Xbox Series X and Series S received better messaging than the PlayStation 5, but the situation was still a mess. We’re keeping an eye on the preorder situation and updating our Xbox Series X and Series S preorder guide as stock becomes available, so keep an eye on it if you’re still looking to buy one. Or just catch up with everything we know about the Xbox Series X/S.

The news that Microsoft purchased Bethesda Softworks parent company ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion is shaking the video games industry, because it seems like a sea change for the release of the next generation of consoles. Suddenly, Microsoft owns not just Bethesda Game Studios, the maker of the hugely popular Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises, but a number of other studios–like Dishonored developer Arkane Studios, Doom developer id Software, and Wolfenstein developer MachineGames. That’s a heavy lineup of game-makers that, one assumes, will suddenly only be making games for future Xbox machines.

That’s the traditional way of thinking, anyway, and the strategy that has defined various iterations of “console wars” for the last three decades. We’re rapidly hitting the end of a generation greatly defined by exclusive games, or the lack thereof. It’s accepted at this point that Sony came out on top in the eighth generation, at least in competition with Microsoft, in large part because of major PS4 exclusive games such as Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and The Last of Us Part 2. Meanwhile, Microsoft had exclusives of its own, mostly first-party games like Gears 5, Halo 5: Guardians, Sea of Thieves, and Forza Horizon 4. But there always seemed to be fewer of them, receiving less acclaim, and with a longer drought between their releases.

So snagging the maker of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, as well as a bunch of other popular games, makes a lot of sense you were looking to build a stable of next-gen exclusives. But the way Xbox boss Phil Spencer has been talking lately, that might not necessarily be the play here. If we take Spencer’s word for it, the ZeniMax acquisition seems more like Microsoft building on a strategy that goes beyond locking players into a specific platform, in order to get them where they live–to sell them on a subscription service and to create bigger cross-platform player bases, instead of just relying on getting customers to commit to a console.

We know that Microsoft’s big play of late is Xbox Game Pass, a subscription service that allows players to download and play a bunch of games on their Xboxes, PCs, or both. Mixed into Game Pass is cloud gaming, where you stream a game over the internet, allowing you to play Xbox and PC games on a variety of devices, including smartphones, without owning them. Game Pass is Microsoft’s move for the future: It’s a Netflix-like subscription service that collects money from players indefinitely and brings them into the Xbox ecosystem.

One of the big selling points of Game Pass is that it gets you all Xbox first-party games on the day of their release as part of the deal, so adding the games Bethesda makes and publishes to that list suddenly makes the subscription even more desirable–and it was already pretty solid.

But it doesn’t really sound like Microsoft’s current strategy is about getting every game-playing member of the public to buy a new Xbox. Sure, the company would like that, but if there’s a big lesson to take away from the eighth generation, it’s that every new hardware cycle is also a hard reset, and from one generation to another, nothing is guaranteed. Microsoft was extremely competitive with Sony during the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era, and then Microsoft’s fortunes shifted considerably with the Xbox One. It seems like Spencer and the rest of Microsoft learned that lesson, and they’re less interested in getting people onto a hardware platform for a few years than they are developing a content ecosystem that could last a lot longer.

“As a player you are the centre of our strategy,” Spencer told GI.biz last summer. “Our device is not the centre of our strategy, our game is not the centre of the strategy. We want to enable you to play the games you want to play, with the friends you want to play with, on any device. On TV, the Xbox console is going to be the best way to play console games.”

He added: “I find it completely counter to what gaming is about to say that part of that is to lock people away from being able to experience those games. Or to force someone to buy my specific device on the day that I want them to go buy it, in order to partake in what gaming is about.”

So acquiring Bethesda et al. and sticking all their games solely on Xbox makes sense in the traditional way of thinking, but going by Spencer’s comments, it’s maybe not the future that he and Microsoft are envisioning. After all, the most cogent example of how exclusivity can be a losing strategy comes from Bethesda’s own Skyrim, a game that has been ported to just about every platform available across two hardware generations, because that’s how high the demand was. Microsoft could leverage Elder Scrolls’ popularity as an exclusive to sell consoles, but that would mean missing out on sales on all the other platforms where Skyrim has seen major success. Spencer sounds like he has something else in mind.

In an interview with GameSpot last year, Spencer described the change in the Xbox’s focus through the Xbox One era. That new focus looked past hardware toward being more open, leading to things like Microsoft’s expansion of Minecraft across numerous platforms (most recently PlayStation VR) and allowing cross-play in Xbox and PC games–something Sony has (somewhat begrudgingly) followed suit on. The last year has seen Microsoft push Game Pass as its big initiative–its Game Pass Ultimate cloud gaming service just hit Android devices, and is pretty impressive.

“The number of people that are actually buying a console every generation isn’t growing dramatically, if at all,” Spencer told GameSpot. “At one point you have to recognize that, okay, you can’t just lead with one device. You can’t just say, here’s an Xbox. I’m going to go sell this device to every single person and that’s what they’re going to play on. That just doesn’t work.”

“Nintendo is a strong player in this industry,” Spencer said. “Do I wish every Switch player was also an Xbox owner? That would be awesome, but that’s not going to happen. Sony is the same way. I don’t think gaming is better if Xbox somehow replaces PlayStation.”

Again, it’s tough to see the future, business strategies shift, and who knows if Microsoft and Spencer’s position has changed after acquiring ZeniMax. But if you view the purchase as a part of the vision Spencer previously outlined, then it seems much more likely that at least some games, like Elder Scrolls VI, aren’t going to be locked onto Xbox (in fact, Microsoft has already said that Bethesda games announced for other platforms will stay there). There’s a bigger picture to see.

Maybe Microsoft thinks it can make money on consoles (it can’t be a coincidence that the ZeniMax acquisition news dropped the day before Xbox Series X and S consoles become available for preorder), and subscriptions, and on games on other platforms. Maybe it wants to insulate against potential ebbs in console loyalty in five or seven years, even if it happens to come out swinging this generation. Maybe Microsoft is thinking that it has a worse chance of convincing you to replace the box you play games on with an Xbox–and a better one of turning that box into an Xbox.

It’s hard to do more than speculate. But it does seem like, in paying $7.5 billion for ZeniMax, the chances are better for Microsoft to lose money by walling off games people love on a console not everyone will buy. From the way Spencer has been talking and the moves Microsoft has been making, securing a bunch of console exclusives comes off as shortsighted. We’ll have to wait and see what Microsoft’s actual plans turn out to be, but based on what we’ve heard so far, acquiring Bethesda and its related studios sounds less like a step backward toward traditional console competition than it does a step forward toward something new.

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