A very touchy subject for many, however someone needs to bring this up, and i guess my last effort was considered trolling, so ill make my own thread on it.

As the title reads, many scalpers are getting nervous trying to sell there next gen stock. The longer they wait the less chance they can sell due to more stock arriving on store shelves and many customers are waiting. 

The way the modern scalping system works is that Scalpers use bots which automatically find available stock and place orders, the more bots they have, the more systems they can buy into. This can deplete stock quit quickly and sell out before customers can even wake up to awareness. 

SpawnWave nails it on the head at 3:00 in the video below.

"Sony has managed to move 2 to 2.5m PS5 systems already.. and think about how hard it is to still find a PS5. It does make me think that these resellers, which we heard about that one group! who has control of 3500 hundred systems right now, and there are a lot of groups BTW.. so i kinda think that the competition just to be able to get one of these listings in front of you on Ebay or Amazon or Twitter or Facebook where ever, is kind of difficult, its almost like that the PS5 reseller market is getting kind of saturated" 

Weather people consider Spawnwave as a decent source, there are other videos to explain it more simpler. 

Scalping is a serious issue and needs to be noticed by the public. Both the XSX and PS5 suffer from this same issue where both have sold out in record time and sold record numbers, but the harder question is, did the stock actually sell this fast or was it a simple transition moving from one warehouse to another?

Enjoy the video and comment respectfully.

The cheapest PlayStation I can find on ebay is £700 (digital edition), literally double it's retail price. If scalpers are having any trouble selling it's only because they charge so much.

"Both the XSX and PS5 suffer from this same issue where both have sold out in record time and sold record numbers, but the harder question is, did the stock actually sell this fast or was it a simple transition moving from one warehouse to another?"

If scalpers didn't exist they would have all sold to actual consumers.

Scalping is not different than investing. People can make money but they can also lose money. I want a ps5 quite strongly, for Demon, but I refuse to pay over retail. I have no issues waiting. I also don't take issue with scalpers, if somebody is willing to pay $1,000 for a $500 console, good for them. People dictate market value.

I hope they all loss money on them. I don't even want them to break even.

I mean it's hardly like they're worried. They might struggle to sell at their current ridiculous prices, but the worst case scenario is that they sell them for on a bit more than what they bought 'em for. I suppose they do have the sunk costs of their expensive bots though. 

It's incredibly difficult to actually estimate what proportion of consoles actually went to scalpers. Or indeed what proportion of "scalpers" are actually opportunists who wanted the console to begin with, but saw big prices and decided to sell on. 

One interesting corollary of the existence of scalpers is that lots of gaming technology launches at too low a price. It would actually be more efficient if manufacturers priced their new electronics high enough so that at launch they don't have such excess demand. 

Naw, fuck scalpers. 

These resellers with stacks of PS5s creating artificial scarcity is so disgusting and predatory. 

It is predatory but only works if people are willing to pay 3x more than MSRP, which many people are. It takes two parties. Scalping would go away if people would stop giving in to it. I want a ps5 and can't find one, but I'm also not paying over MSRP.

It backfires sometimes. I remember the Wii U and Xbox One X suffering from scalping one for it to backfire. Personally, I wanted to wait until next year before buying either system. The scarcity kinda made me anxious but I'm back to my senses, now. I think a lot of gamers are going to realize that, at least for now, there isn't much incentive to upgrade so early. I watch comparison videos and I'm not blown away. Gonna buy Sackboy and Spider-Man MM for PS4 and be satisfied.

I'd never buy from a scalper, anyway. Too big of an investment to trust some random seller. I still expect things to cool off majorly after the launch window.

Its not weather or not the systems would have sold, of course they would have sold eventually, however "in record time" is one key factor we need to take note on here. The reasons these consoles flew off the shelf was indeed helped by scalpers which many brought multiple units, some even thousands of units. 

The moment the XSX and PS5 were up for pre-order actually crashed some sites and were instantly sold out, that's because the bots can react quicker than any human, which instantly acted on release.

The moment scalpers know that there is a shortage in supply is when they hit the hardest and that's exactly what we saw with both PS and Xbox systems. 

I vote a law should take place to ban scalping or at least limit the amount someone can buy and sell for. 

There was a Series S selling for $750US. That's even more ridiculous.

Sony and MS dont expect to meet demand until April. These resellers will be fine.