Won't lie—an unintended benefit of us not knowing (and by extension, not sharing) an exact Stadium XL shipping date is that competitors can't ramp up their marketing gorilla the day before our launch.
It's kinda shitty when companies do this, but I get it. We knew about Fender's Tone Master Pro a couple of months before launch and had zero interest in trying to step on their toes. We also knew about Axe FX III like 6, 7 months before launch. Some of our ME/EE team went to China and took a group photo with a then-unreleased Powercab. That same photo happened to show an empty Axe FX III chassis lurking in the background, which is pretty lazy and crappy on the CM's part. Our team didn't even see it that day; we only noticed it when zooming in on the photo later.
EDIT—Proof:
View attachment 54153
Oh, we left plenty of surprises and easter eggs in there.