Looks like a lot of the distributors in the US have had their allocations cut in half and in some cases even people who were paid up well in advance have had the bad news they can no longer get the LE. Seems very wrong, but maybe Metallica themselves are looking after people on the side so to say....

Metallica LE was always going to be popular. I know the premium is essentially the same game, but Stern could have easily sold 1000 LE's, so I wonder why they didn't cash in?

The cases in the States seemed more like there were distributors that took pre-orders for Metallica LE's before they even knew the exact number that Stern was going to supply them . The distributors are blaming Stern for cutting back numbers ( which the distributor never had to start with ) .

If they made 1000 LE's then it defeats the purpose of having a Limited Edition machine . I know that at 1000 it is still "limited" but most of Stern's LE releases thus far have been a total number of 500 ( Tron was 400 ) . A lot of people buying the Metallica LE would be repeat LE buyers and if they go and double the amount made you would have a lot of disgruntled LE collectors as suddenly the LE name tag would not mean as much . The end result would be people NOT buying the LE on future releases , thus Stern would be shooting themselves in the foot to collect on the cash cow as Cavey mentioned above .