Atari founder Nolan Bushnell has praised US 360 shortages lead to eBay sale surge

With demand for Xbox 360 outstripping supply on both sides of the Atlantic, the boss of the US arm of eBay has claimed that her site has seen 40,000 360s sold since the machine launched over there.

Meg Whitman, chief executive of eBay, revealed on Thursday that users of her nerd-powered version of the car boot sale had bought and sold 40,000 of the next generation consoles during the 10 days since Microsoft's machine arrived in the shops.

This, if you accept the widely circulated figure of 400,000 Xbox 360s hitting shelves in the US, means that 10% of the consoles have already changed hands, and mostly for prices $100 to $250 above the ones paid in the shops.

And considering that most of the 6500 Xbox 360s currently listed for sale on the US site are described as being in their 'original packaging,' we guess that they aren't all being sold by US gamers who've already grown tired of Gotham or Call of Duty 2.

Unless they all need the money to pay for their liposuction.

0 comments - Last Comment By wraggster
18:07 December 5th, 2005
360 hard drive - a third smaller than advertised?

Posted By: wraggster

The Xbox 360 hard drive is certainly 20GB in total, but players can never access more than 13GB of storage space - just two thirds of the stated size.

Obviously some space will always be required by the operating system, as true of everything from iPods to desktop computers, but it's rarely such a high proportion.

The Windows XP operating system for PC, for instance, uses less than 2GB of hard disk space.

While there's no doubt that 360s hard drive is indeed the claimed size, its effective, usable capacity is actually only 65% of that. This could become more problematic as large files, such as high-definition movies, become more common.

Out of the box, Xbox 360 has only 12GB of free space, but it's possible to free another gigabyte by deleting the demo movies and music.

We're currently waiting for a statement from Microsoft regarding this. As soon as we hear anything, we'll let you know.