The first restock of PS5 for 2021 has started this week, with retailers like GAME, Currys PC World and ShopTo all accepting orders yesterday. However, demand for the console is still very high and a scalper group has claimed to have purchased over 2,000 units from GAME alone.
One bot claims to have made successful checkouts at GAME, which was later denied by GAME indicating that the pre-order may have been successful but extra checks would be made before taking payment and dispatching orders.
GAME gave the following statement to Eurogamer on the above claim by bots and scalpers:
PS5 continues to be in very high demand and that demand far outweighs current supply. We have strong measures in place to help ensure that our ‘1 per customer’ statement is maintained to allow for as many individual customers to successfully purchase as possible.
All pre-orders are subject to automatic checks and order updates such as cancellations following these checks take place after a customer will have received a valid order confirmation email. At the present time these orders are still pre-orders and as such no payments have yet been taken from customers. Payments will commence once our order checks have been completed.
The Currys PC World and ShopTo websites were overwhelmed with users rushing to order a console, with Currys having a digital queue of over 10,000 people at one point.
Other retailers including Argos and SmythToys, and websites like Very and AO.com will all have limited stock availability this month, so you’ll have to keep an eye out if you are looking to get hold of a PS5. More stock is expected in early February, but unless something is done about bots and scalpers, the console is going to be very hard to get over the next few months.
If you can’t hold of a PS5 from an official retailer, marketplaces such as Facebook, Ebay, Gumtree and others have plenty available, but at a much higher premium. Unfortunately, desperate people will pay this higher prices to get hold of the console, further fuling scalpers to purchase more units. The only way to beat the scalpers is to block them (which doesn’t seem to be happening by the retailers), or to stop buying the consoles at much higher prices.