The Christmas shopping season is inefficient. It’s a boon to retailers, sure, but it comes in the worst possible way: all at once. To accommodate the Christmas season, employers have to hire and train seasonal employees for a few weeks worth of work, shopping centers have to build parking lots that sit mostly empty 11 months out of the year, and so on. If Christmas were eliminated and the income from the shopping frenzy were spread throughout the year (like for birthdays, which are more or less evenly distributed), retailers would be thrilled. They wouldn’t just kill Christmas, they’d dance on its corpse to the tune of crying children.

Of course, Christmas is a community tradition, so it’s important that its celebrants mark the occasion at the same time, no matter what the grinches at Kmart would prefer. Even people who don’t celebrate Christmas often feel compelled to join in the spirit, either by enhancing the significance of an existing holiday or by creating a new one. It’s an old trick—after all, Christmas piggybacked on pagan traditions like Saturnalia and the birthday of Sol Invictus. Point is, people like to party in December, and even if we’re not sacrificing goats anymore, the December traditions work best when everybody’s in sync.

Last week, PlayStation Home launched an “open beta.” Millions of PS3 owners signed on to try the virtual world, the servers got overwhelmed, and Sony got hit with the usual wave of “I can’t connect!” complaints. Online product launches have become miniature Black Fridays all their own. Launch, crash, apologize, and return to step 1, until enough people are frustrated enough to give up and ease the load on the network. It’s the gaming industry’s own Christmas Problem, and sometimes it even coincides with Dec. 25, like last Christmas when kids everywhere plugged in their new Xbox 360s for the first time, hosing the Xbox Live servers.

LittleBigPlanet, Call of Duty 4, and countless other games, not to mention shiny phones, have suffered crippling server issues this year. But given that a network spike is so much easier to handle, in terms of staffing and facilities, than the annual rush of customers that a brick-and-mortar retail chain faces, why does it always go so wrong? Why are huge, presumably capable companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Apple unable to prevent the Christmas problem from popping up again and again? Possible explanations, in order of credibility:

1. Load testing remains a dark art, so it’s tough to predict where a system will break when millions of customers place it under strain.
2. Even though it’s possible to lease more computers and bandwidth, accountants decide it’s not worth the expense to accommodate the first-day flood of tire-kickers.
3. The executives making the IT decisions don’t think their products will be as popular as they turn out to be.
4. The companies secretly like the publicity they get from server outages because it shows that everybody desperately wants their product.

Explanation #3, “We didn’t expect that it would be such a hit,” is the party line trotted out by PR people in the midst of network snafus. To its credit, it does manage to put a shine on a crappy situation, to the extent that naïve cynics start to believe Explanation #4. It doesn’t make sense, though. Game companies have access to sales figures, pre-order numbers, etc. Estimating an upper limit to the number of users who will sign on to your network is not exactly high-level calculus.

I’ve heard Explanation #4 a lot, and it is, in short, complete crap. Around the time that the PS3 and Wii came out, when both were facing shortages, one conventional wisdom was that the companies intentionally limited supply to create a frenzy around their product. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” they say. You know what they don’t say? “There’s no such thing as bad sales.” The reason they don’t say that is because it’s so freaking obvious. On Dec. 25, Microsoft executives would rather sell Xbox Live Arcade games to millions of euphoric new Xbox owners than read a story in USA Today about how they ruined Christmas. $$$ > press.

My best guess is a mixture of #1 and #2: Companies are willing to deal with some growing pains at the outset, and computer networks remain complicated enough that it’s very hard to tell when and where they’re going to go wrong. But I wonder if I’m right, and more to the point, I wonder if there’s a smart solution to the Christmas Problem, online or off.