Set an alarm for 5:45am today. Not because I had anywhere to be, but because the PS5 officially launches in the US today and I told myself I'd be smart about it this time. I was not smart about it. Nobody who wanted one today was smart enough, because the odds were never really in our favor to begin with.
Here's what my morning looked like: four tabs open (Best Buy, Walmart, Target, GameStop), phone in one hand, coffee going cold in the other, refreshing on a loop starting around 6:40am when the first rumors of a Best Buy restock hit Twitter. I actually got the disc version, $499, into a Best Buy cart at 6:52. Made it to the shipping address page. Then the site just... stopped. Spinner forever. By the time it recovered, cart was empty and the item said "Sold Out" again. Eleven minutes, start to finish. That's the whole story of my PS5 launch day.
I want to be clear this isn't really about me being annoyed I didn't get a toy. It's the mechanism that bugs me. These restocks aren't selling out to actual people sitting at actual keyboards at 6:52am. They're selling out to bots running scripted checkouts in milliseconds, buying six or eight or twelve units at a time, which then show up on eBay by lunch for $900 to $1,200. I saw a listing this afternoon for a digital-edition unit, the $399 one, going for $850 with "free shipping." Free! Very generous of them.
The Xbox Series X did the same thing two days ago on Tuesday. Same story, different console: $499 for the X, $299 for the S, both gone within minutes at every major retailer, both immediately relisted at double or triple price by people who never intended to plug one in. My brother-in-law got a Series X through pure luck, hit refresh on Target's site at the exact right second, and even he admitted it felt less like shopping and more like winning a raffle he didn't know he'd entered.
And this isn't even new for this fall. The RTX 3080 launched back in September at $699 and I still haven't seen one in stock anywhere at that price two months later. Same scalper bots, same eBay markup, same pattern. At some point you start to wonder if "launch day" just doesn't mean what it used to. I remember, way back before I started this blog, waiting in an actual physical line outside a Circuit City for a console launch. Miserable, cold, boring — but at least the person in front of you in line was a person.
My actual opinion, and I'll just say it plainly: retailers should be doing randomized lottery signups for anything this in-demand, the way Nintendo did with some Switch stock earlier this year, instead of a straight first-come-first-served drop that any twelve-year-old with a $30 bot subscription can beat. It's not a hard problem. It's just not a problem retailers are especially motivated to solve, because the units sell either way and the bad PR is apparently cheaper than building queue infrastructure.
Anyway. I'm not getting a PS5 today. Probably not this month either, going by how today went. My kid has been asking about it since the Spider-Man: Miles Morales trailers started running, and I don't have a great answer for her beyond "some robots got there first." We still have the PS4 hooked up, it still works fine, and there's a stack of games in the drawer under the TV we never finished. Could be worse. I'll try again Friday and probably lose again, but at 6:52am for eleven minutes today I really thought I had one.