It's still really hard to find a PS5 more than a year after the next-gen (now current-gen) consoles first launched. Although Sony says over 17 million units have been shipped as of last December, that's still not enough to satisfy eager PlayStation customers looking to get their next-gen hardware.
Naturally, all this pent-up demand leads to the perfect situation for scalpers. Scalping got so bad last holiday season that a US Senator even proposed a law that would make the practice illegal (that law of course died in the Senate, where all good bills go to die). CNET reported that the best way to deal with scalpers is to actually join them and create a scalping bot of your own.
Unless you live in China, where apparently the best way to get a PS5 is to be a level-three member of Bilibili, China's version of YouTube. The news comes courtesy of Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad, who noted that Chinese users could purchase a PS5 through this exclusive deal.
"An equivalent would be like if PS5s were available to Twitch users with a certain number of channel points," noted Ahmad, later asking if Sony had a similar deal with any Western companies. A Twitter user responded with deals from Costco and Walmart, but those two companies require that you pay for their memberships while Bilibili allows users to reach level three with just good user engagement.
Ahmad also noted that the Bilibili deal is likely there as a verification process to stop people from scalping. It might suck, but having these verification steps in place does at least prevent a scalper’s bot from just swooping onto an online marketplace and buying up all the stock as soon as it appears.
In the meantime, ongoing supply chain shortages caused by the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine is likely to make it even harder to find a PS5. Sorry, but the future of next-gen consoles looks pretty bleak at the moment.
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