It’s a story as old as Tickle Me Elmo and much older, but it’s become such a mainstay of the video game hardware market that it feels just baked into launch plans at this point. But it’s been particularly bad this time around: every single time the PS5 and Xbox Series X have gone on sale, they’ve sold out mere seconds after becoming available. The only time it feels like they stuck up for more than a few minutes was the very first round of PS5 pre-orders, and that was only because they went up without any sort of warning. Some of this, of course, ha to do with eager humans who want the machines. But bots, resellers and the gray market have a huge part to play.
A recent report on Businessinsider delved into the world of resale bots, including one eye-opening example of a reseller group that managed to grab nearly 3,500 PS5s for resale through the use of bots, a painful number to see when most people are just trying to get one. The group began as sneaker resellers and then expanded into video games and other sectors during the pandemic, hoping to make a profit off of in-demand items.
We saw a similar thing when the Nintendo Switch became the hot item of early lockdown, as well as with the recent launch of NVIDIA’s 3000-series graphics cards. These problems are exacerbated by lockdown both because people are playing more games than ever, and because many retailers are choosing to make stock available online-only for safety reasons. Typically, real humans gain an edge when it comes to in-person shopping. Without that, the bots are hard to beat.
It’s not hard to see why this happens: with prices on sites like eBay hitting north of $1,000, there’s good money to be made here. Clearly, many people value the PS5 higher than its MSRP of $499. Because no retailer is selling it for higher than that price, the grey market swoops in and makes up the difference. After that, we enter into a feedback loop: people use bots because people want to buy the in-demand item, which in turn makes the item even more scarce and grants more and more market power to the resellers that are snagging all the stock.
It’s a problem that is unlikely to go away for a good long while. I hope that stock might stabilize in the middle of next year, but honestly the extreme demand here is making me wonder if that will even happen. But it will stabilize, that we can be sure of. It’s only a question of when.
