If you can’t provide them for the consumers. Can’t get my hands on anything these days and it’s got me kind of upset. I’m looking at late this year just to get a steam deck and it’s kind of silly at this point.
I want to be able to go down to the store and buy a ps5 and take it home and play it in one day. Like the good ole days. Call me entitled, idc.
I feel your pain. It took me over a year to get ahold of a PS5 since I am not willing to spend a penny over retail. I finally managed to luck into one. Which, to be honest, is one (of several) reasons why I haven’t logged into WoW since February.
This is almost entirely due to scalpers, at least in the case of the PS5 and Series X. Around the middle of last year I lucked out and had an opportunity to buy a PS5 in a stock drop that the scalpers’ bots weren’t set up to handle and getting one was easy. Took like an hour of normal people buying before they ran out. I didn’t have to rush through checkout or anything.
On some of these things being scalped, production is starting to catch up. In the case of GPUs, there’s going to be new hotness in town with the Nvidia RTX 4000 series and AMD Radeon 7000 series being released soon, both of which are considerably more powerful, which will be pulling the attention of scalpers and miners, meaning that there will be a sudden glut of RTX 3000 and Radeon 6000 cards on the market as scalpers, retailers, and miners all try to dump them before they get stuck with them.
Scalpers are bastards, no doubt, but they aren’t causing the supply issues that are responsible for the lack of PS5’s and Series X consoles on the market. Blaming them would only make sense if they were hoarding the consoles but they aren’t, they sell them off immediately for profit.
Every new console that gets made and sold by a retailer pretty much immediately ends up in the hands of a gamer, the scalpers don’t have warehouses full of the things or anything lol
As someone who had to camp for a PS5 soon after its release for myself and two other people, a GTX 3080TI, and a 3070TI, scalpers are indeed a major contributor to compounding the problem on top of the chip shortages. They originally did it for stuff like concert tix and limited-edition sneakers and make their way over to gaming consoles, CPUs, and GPUs when the chip shortages started. It is the gamers that had to struggle to get one.
Scalpers use bots to automate purchases from all online retailers selling them, within seconds from listing and flying through the checkout before you can even have a chance to click “add to basket”, and relist them on eBay for thousands of dollars. Most of the time you didn’t even get to SEE the option to add; it went from “coming soon” to “out of stock”. That is how they made their bulk purchases.
It is why those online retailers had to come out with all sorts of strategies to combat them, like using human-check captchas, a queue system (Best Buy), NewEgg Shuffle, in-store pick-up only, etc.
I’m aware of how scalpers operate but you missed the point of my response, scalpers are just opportunistic -insert expletives- , they don’t really contribute to the shortages, they’re capitalizing on them for profit. They would need to stockpile consoles in order to contribute to the shortages but they don’t, they always sell them again pretty quickly so the amount of consoles out in the world is basically the same.
This is exactly what they’re doing (article from 2020):
Whether they’re hoarding a product for their own use or reselling them for profit, most people want to purchase from the main supply chain at MSRP, not the markup from a scalper, so they are left waiting - hence the “shortage”. Only the ones that want to buy it at $2k are impatient and probably in the minority, making those scalpers hold onto whatever they still have remaining, while the MFGR continues to churn out more for everyone else.
In other words, I wouldn’t doubt if the ones on eBay now selling PS5 in the $700-range are the former hoarders that were trying to sell them at $2k.
You do realize how infinitesimal that number is compared to the wholesale numbers hitting the open market, ultimately those 3500 consoles will end up in the hands of gamers but they aren’t in any way contributing to the overall shortages, that all comes down to parts/materials at the manufacturing end.
Just so i’m making myself perfectly clear, i am in no way defending them, they’re dirt bags, but in reality it would be no different to Bestbuy or whoever jacking up their prices so that their stock sells slower but earns more profit, we’d hate them for it but ultimately it wouldn’t have an influence on manufacturing, we’re talking about a retail issue.
I understand what you’re saying. In the sense of a product that can get resold like a gaming console, as opposed to a product that gets expelled entirely like food or fuel, “shortage” is probably the wrong term to describe the whole matter.
Manufacturing issues can cause shortages, while scalping bots are more like… slowing the inventory flow of the ones that are made to a crawl.
They really are dirtbags, because once the new gen comes out, some would still be floating around with even less buyers.
Absolutely, they really should have tied the initial waves to PSN accounts with a specific min threshold of games owned or achievements earned, something to weed out the bots and fake accounts and get the consoles into the hands of the players directly.
Went to The Source to take back a monitor after I read bad reviews on it, I was like “Have you seen any PS5 lately?” they said they had some!
I nearly fainted.
They were kept in the back, and you had to buy the “bundle” which cost more but included warranty/extra controller and it had Horizon Forbidden West(I never played the first one, not sure I will play this one).
It cost me about $900 Canadian but at least I finally got one.
It was limited to 1 per customer, so my mom bought one too. My son turns 17 tomorrow and has wanted the PS5 since they released.