PS5 Scalping Continues With 140k Units Sold on Online Market

The PlayStation 5 has been under supply constraints since launch.  The new console has been hard to find and the secondary market prices for the PlayStation 5 have been booming on sites like StockX.  Regardless of which version of the console you’re looking for you’re going to pay up and the consoles could continue to be incredibly hard to find through this year and the next.

The pandemic has put a damper on manufacturing world wide and it’s led to semiconductor shortages across the globe which has directly impacted Sony’s ability to manufacture the console.  The PS5 has been a hot item regardless with fans paying hundreds of dollars over retail price, leaving scalpers with huge profits on any console they can get their hands on.

The prices that you’ll find on StockX are still sitting around $800 for the disc version and $750 for the digital version.  According to a recent report by Insider, StockX says that they’ve sold over 140,000 units on their site.  Trying to get one of these consoles has been a futile effort by many and they don’t even realize that they’re competing against automatic purchase bots that crawl retail page sites waiting for buy buttons to appear when stocks refresh.  From there, the bots go through the check out process faster than a normal user can click through the standard options on the page.  After that, the consoles land on places like StockX and get a massive price increase.  Around launch it was not uncommon to find consoles going for upwards of $1500 when FOMO was at a fever pitch.

It is hard to tell what will happen in the months ahead.  As things begin to get back to normal, perhaps the supply constrained industries that deal with semi-conductors will get sorted out.

And this is just for the PlayStation 5.  The Xbox Series X/S have also been in high demand since it launched last year.  The good news is that you’re not missing much.  Both consoles haven’t released much in terms of must-play games.  Speaking of must-play games though, we recently reviewed Mass Effect: Legendary Edition which you can play just fine on a PlayStation 4.