So it's been almost a month since the PS5 came out and I still don't have one. I want to be annoyed about this in a funny way but honestly I'm just annoyed.
Quick recap for anyone who hasn't been following along: Sony launched the thing on November 12th, $499 for the disc version, $399 if you're fine going digital-only. Xbox Series X came out around the same time too, same story. And then both consoles basically vanished off the face of the earth within about eleven minutes of being available anywhere. I didn't even try that first week because I assumed, naively, that stock would settle down by December. It has not settled down by December.
What I've actually been doing, and I'm slightly ashamed to admit this, is keeping a browser tab open to Walmart's product page and refreshing it during meetings. Not proud of it. I also signed up for one of those restock alert Twitter bots that just screams into the void every time Best Buy or Target's inventory API twitches, and let me tell you, getting a phone notification at 6:47am that says "IN STOCK" and then watching the page 404 by the time you tap through is its own specific flavor of pre-coffee misery. I missed one drop by maybe ninety seconds last Tuesday. Ninety seconds. The item was in my cart. Cart. And then it wasn't.
The scalper thing makes it so much worse than a normal shortage. This isn't like the early pandemic toilet paper situation where it was just genuinely not enough supply for demand and eventually shelves caught up. There are bots out there written specifically to hammer checkout pages faster than any human can click, buying up entire restocks in the first sixty seconds, and then the units show up on eBay an hour later going for $750, $800, sometimes north of $900 for a console that costs five hundred bucks at retail. I don't even fully blame the individual resellers, some of them are just regular people who got lucky and are cashing out, but the organized bot operations running dozens of accounts are a different thing entirely and it's kind of wild that this is just allowed to happen in the open on a marketplace that big.
And it's not only consoles. Anyone who tried to buy an RTX 3080 this fall knows exactly what I'm talking about, same exact pattern, same bots, same reseller markup. I gave up on that hunt back in October and I'm honestly not sure I'll bother trying again before spring. There's something almost funny about how the entire consumer tech hardware market decided to have its supply chain meltdown during the one holiday season everyone's stuck at home wanting to buy exactly that stuff.
Anyway. I did the math on whether I even need a PS5 right now versus just being annoyed on principle that I can't have one, and the honest answer is my backlog on the PS4 is embarrassing enough that I probably shouldn't be spending money on new hardware anyway. I never finished Persona 5. I bought Death Stranding at launch last year and have played maybe four hours of it. There's a version of this where I just close the Walmart tab, boot up something I already own, and let the restock chaos be somebody else's problem for a while.
I'm not going to close the tab though. Let's be honest with each other here.
If anyone reading this actually managed to snag one through legitimate means and not a bot, I'd genuinely like to know how, because at this point I feel like I'm missing some secret knowledge that everyone else has. Drop a comment if you've got tips. Otherwise I'll be here, refreshing, at 6am, forever, apparently.