Get Ready to Fight for a Console This Holiday Season
PS5, Xbox Series X, and the incoming Switch OLED are all chasing the same scarce chips, and analysts say the holidays will be brutal.
If you were hoping the console shortage would quietly resolve itself before the holidays, I’ve got bad news. Analysts spent the back half of August basically saying the same thing in unison: expect this to be the scarcest holiday season for gaming hardware in recent memory. PS5, Xbox Series X, and now the newly announced Switch OLED are all fighting over the same limited pool of chips, and none of them are winning fast enough.
The Switch OLED is the new wrinkle here. Nintendo confirmed it’s shipping October 8, which puts it right in the thick of pre-holiday demand alongside Sony and Microsoft’s consoles that are still nowhere close to meeting demand almost a year after launch. Three major consoles all drawing from the same constrained chip supply, all launching or restocking in the same quarter — it’s not hard to see why people are bracing for a mess.
Sony already told us this was coming
What’s notable is that Sony isn’t sugarcoating it. The company has told investors directly that PS5 demand will outstrip supply well into 2022. That’s not a vague “we’re working on it” — that’s a company telling shareholders, in plain terms, not to expect this to resolve anytime soon. When a manufacturer is willing to say that out loud in an earnings call, you know the underlying chip situation is genuinely bad, not just a marketing tactic to keep hype alive.
And to be fair, keeping hype alive was never really the issue with the PS5. Demand was never the bottleneck. It’s been supply, full stop, since launch day. Wafer capacity, packaging constraints, freight bottlenecks — pick your favorite link in the chain, they’re all still under strain.
The new normal for console shopping
What strikes me most is how quickly restock bots and resale markups have gone from “shady scalper behavior” to just… how you buy a console in 2021. Restock-alert bots pinging the moment Best Buy or Walmart flips inventory live, Discord servers dedicated entirely to tracking drops, resellers flipping units at 1.5x or 2x MSRP without much shame — it’s all become normalized in under a year. That’s a genuinely weird thing to watch happen to a consumer product category. A generation ago you’d walk into a store on launch day and maybe wait in line. Now you need a bot, a fast trigger finger, and probably a little luck.
If you’re a parent trying to land a PS5 or Series X under the tree this December, my honest advice is to start paying attention now, not in November. Follow the restock trackers, set alerts, and don’t assume retail stock will magically improve just because it’s the holidays — if anything, demand spikes make it worse. The Switch OLED might actually be your easiest bet of the three, simply because it’s a new SKU rather than a completely sold-out existing line, but even that’s not guaranteed once October hits. Chip shortages don’t care about your holiday shopping list.