Last week, Sony announced with great fanfare the arrival of a special collection for the 30th anniversary of the PlayStation brand with unique consoles and accessories sold in limited edition. The new PS5 Pro, the PS5 Slim, the DualSense and DualSense Edge controllers as well as the PlayStation Portal were thus in the spotlight.
Unfortunately, as every time a brand or artist offers a limited edition item, we expected stock shortages very quickly with many scalpers who were going to spoil the party to grab everything and resell the consoles at high prices on the Internet. Alas, we were right.
From 3,000 to 10,000 euros for a PS5 Pro
For this 30th Anniversary collection, Sony offered several packs at more or less affordable prices with:
- A PS5 Pro 30th Anniversary bundle + DualSense + DualSense Edge + Controller charger at 1099.99 euros
- A PS5 Pro 30th Anniversary at 799.99 euros
- A PS5 Slim 30th Anniversary at 499.99 euros
- A DualSense Edge 30th Anniversary at 274.99 euros
- A PlayStation Portal 30th Anniversary at 249.99 euros
- A DualSense 30th Anniversary at 79.99 euros
Pre-orders began this morning at 10am on the official PlayStation website. In just a few minutes, all stocks were sold out. Until this afternoon, it was possible to pre-order a DualSense Edge and a PlayStation Portal, but all other accessories and consoles quickly went out of stock.
Unfortunately, we didn't have to wait long to see a great many ads that started to appear online on eBay and Le Bon Coin with crazy prices, offering the PS5 Pro bundle at 3000 euros and up to 5000 euros. That is, three to five times the base price.
The controller is not spared either. Sold at 79.99 euros, the latter can be found at more than 200 euros on eBay. Unfortunately, these fraudulent practices prevent true fans from being able to treat themselves and buy a beautiful console to complete their collection. And the worst part is that it works, since many ads are starting to be sold, one after the other.
If in France, we see an average price of around 3000 euros, it goes even further across the Channel with PS5 Pro bundles that are sold for up to £10,000 (around 120,000 euros) as noted by Tom Warren, the journalist at The Verge.
Scalpers: a scourge that we can't escape?
For several years, and the democratization of online pre-orders, scalpers have been making life difficult for fans. Whether it's to buy consoles (and not necessarily limited editions), concert tickets or limited edition derivative products.
These scalpers use software to hack sites and bypass waiting lists in order to make numerous purchases in just a few minutes. Even if sales are limited to one copy, these scalpers generally have several accounts allowing them to easily buy around ten consoles in one go.
At the time of the launch of the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S (in November 2020) during the shortages, many scalpers had managed to buy consoles (sometimes up to fifty machines), to resell standard PS5s for more than 1000 euros, i.e. double the price of the console at its launch.
What solutions are there to combat scalpers?
It's now a habit and everyone knows it. Each sale of limited edition products quickly ends up out of stock and ads with completely crazy prices appear on the Internet and on sites specializing in resale.
So, in the best of all possible worlds, this would first involve action by brands in collaboration with resale sites, simply prohibiting the resale of certain products for a period of at least one year (or more) to dissuade scalpers. It would also be necessary to set a legal resale price preventing completely absurd ads that can approach 10,000 euros. The ideal would of course be for a law to be put in place by the different governments in each country to control the resale of new products.
The other option is to only make sales in physical points of sale. For the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, the Covid-19 pandemic had not allowed for in-store reservations. Today, restrictions have been lifted and it would be wise to offer pre-orders only in physical stores to avoid the scourge of waiting lists.
Finally, this also involves gamers who absolutely must avoid falling into vice and spending such sums. If no one buys, scalpers will not offer such high prices and will stop storming events like the PlayStation 30th Anniversary collection so much.
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