Eight Months Later, Buying a PS5 Is Still a Blood Sport
The PS5 and Xbox Series X remain nearly impossible to buy at MSRP as the chip shortage drags on, with Sony warning demand will outpace supply into 2022.
It’s been more than eight months since the PS5 and Xbox Series X launched, and I still don’t know a single person who’s walked into a store and bought one off the shelf like it’s a normal product. That’s how long this has dragged on. What was forgivable in December — “it’s the holidays, cut them some slack” — is a lot harder to shrug off in August.
The culprit hasn’t changed: the global semiconductor shortage that’s been squeezing everything from cars to laptops is still squeezing consoles too. Sony and Microsoft aren’t choosing to be stingy with supply; they’re at the mercy of fabs that can’t keep up with demand across every industry that needs chips right now. Consoles are competing for the same wafer capacity as automakers and PC makers, and consoles are not winning that fight.
The restock grind
If you want a PS5 right now, your best strategy isn’t walking into a Best Buy — it’s following an alert account. Wario64 has basically become required reading for anyone hunting a console, along with a handful of other bot-and-human hybrid accounts that ping the second a retailer’s stock page goes live. Drops happen with almost no warning, inventory is small, and the window to actually get through checkout before everything shows “out of stock” again is measured in minutes, sometimes seconds.
That dynamic has spawned its own weird ecosystem: scalper bots snapping up units to resell at absurd markups, browser extensions that auto-refresh product pages, and a cottage industry of YouTube videos explaining the “best time” to check Target’s website. None of it should be necessary to buy a $500 piece of consumer electronics, but here we are.
Why this isn’t ending soon
The part that should temper anyone’s hopes for a quick fix: Sony has reportedly told analysts that PS5 demand will keep outpacing supply well into 2022. That’s not a vague hedge — that’s a company telling the people who track its business that this shortage is a multi-year problem, not a blip that clears up by the holidays. Microsoft hasn’t been much more optimistic about Series X availability either.
I get why gamers are frustrated, but I’d push back a little on the idea that Sony or Microsoft are dragging their feet on purpose. Selling every unit you can make, the instant you make it, is about as good a demand signal as a company could ask for — the problem is entirely upstream, in fab capacity that takes years to build out, not months. That’s cold comfort if you’ve been refreshing a cart page since Christmas, but it does explain why “just wait a few more weeks” keeps turning into “just wait a few more months.”
If you’re still hunting, my honest advice is the boring advice: set up alerts, be ready to check out fast, and don’t pay above MSRP unless you really can’t stand to wait. The shortage isn’t a mystery anymore, and it isn’t going away by September.