Scalpers aren’t the main reason you can’t find a new console

Enlarge / The PS5 does indeed come in a box.

It has been over two months since Sony's PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series S/X officially hit store shelves, and both consoles still remain nearly impossible to find at major retailers. In light of these shortages, many would-be next-gen gamers have focused their ire on scalpers. These opportunistic resellers buy new systems the minute they become available at retail (often with the help of automated bots) with the intent to immediately list them for a significant markup on eBay or other third-party sales sites.

These resellers are certainly taking advantage of the situation and redirecting console stock from players who would otherwise be able to get the systems at the manufacturer's suggested retail price. But some recent comprehensive analyses of online listings suggest that resellers are only responsible for a small number of all new console sales in the US. Even in a world without scalpers, current demand for the PS5 and Xbox Series S/X would be greatly outstripping current supplies.

Running the numbers

Self-described Oracle Data Engineer Michael Driscoll has done the legwork here, using Python scripts to scrape eBay and StockX for every successful listing selling a PS5 or an Xbox Series S/X. His analyses of these resale markets provide a fascinating deep dive into the details of secondhand console sales, and we recommend reading them in full. But the headline numbers suggest that roughly 146,000 PS5 consoles (and about 110,000 Xbox Series S/X consoles) have been sold on those two resale clearinghouses since the systems launched in November.

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