PlayStation 5 has definitely sold out

Unsurprisingly, the PlayStation 5 has sold out. SIE boss Jim Ryan has been talking to the Russian news agency TASS and has offered up some information about the current stock status of Sony’s new console. For those who have been hunting for the PS5 via the major retailers, his words won’t come as a bolt from the blue:

Everything is sold. Absolutely everything is sold. And everything will be sold in Russia, there’s no doubt about that. I’ve spent much of the last year trying to be sure that we can generate enough demand for the product. And now in terms of my executive bandwidth I’m spending a lot more time on trying to increase supply to meet that demand.

When stock has been replenished (or simply arrived) retailers have been bombarded with thousands of order requests, leading to considerable disappointment for those who were either too slow, beaten out by a scalper bot, or later found their seemingly confirmed PS5 order to be canceled. Recent stock alerts, via retailers such as Walmart and Kohl’s, have led to pandemonium as gamers try to get their hands on one of the consoles.

Obviously, Sony had to deal with unexpected issues in 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic deeply affecting the amount of PS5 units that could be manufactured. In the TASS interview, Ryan highlighted the huge obstacles Sony had to face: “Before we started production, we had to do all the manufacturing preparation by camera remotely. I mean, just imagine that for a precision device like the PlayStation 5.”

Because of the supply problems, some gamers have had to resort to buying a PS5 from scalpers at unfairly inflated prices. But at least not all examples of having to fall back on this option have been negatively influenced. One incident described on Reddit by u/PGP saw the PS5 purchaser in question pay £780 (about US$1,040; PS5 official price in the UK is £449.99) to get hold of one of the consoles from a seller on eBay. However, this is not a gamer “letting the side down” by buying from a scalper, it was actually a doting mother simply wanting to make her beloved offspring happy, regardless of the additional cost.