After Christmas, new PS5 stocks are still a wasteland

If you were hoping that now that the holiday fever is over, it would be easier to find a PS5, that hasn’t happened yet, and you should know that it will likely be many, many months until the stock PS5 or Xbox Series X comes close to anything that is appear at reasonable levels.

If you’ve been tracking new PS5 stock like I’ve been, you’ll see the exact same kind of limited instant-sell releases as in the run-up to the holidays, though perhaps with even Less of them now, given that Sony of course wanted to put out as many PS5s as they could before the holidays.

This week, we had a surprise drop from PlayStation Direct and then hours ago a brief flurry of stock through Target, with a handful of stores getting a handful of units to pre-order, often 3-6 for a full store, how customers navigated through confusing and broken carts and menus that promised to pick them up at the store but not deliver or vice versa. Some got it, most didn’t.

If there is only one account to follow for PS5 stocks, it would be @ PS5StockAlerts, which has done a commendable job of cornering the console’s limited-supply releases. But you’re competing with his other 600,000 followers, as well as people who have found out that stocks are falling in other ways, so you’ll still need all the luck in the world.

I’ve said before that there has to be a better way to do this, a way of saying sign up with your PSN and join a singular queue that keeps your spot online and allows you guaranteed access to stock when your number is called. But instead, Sony – and the rest of us – are forced to deal with a dozen different retail intermediaries, each with bankrupt websites and small stocks each time this happens. Although even with a singular distribution, that doesn’t exactly solve all the problems either (trying to buy tickets for Ticketmaster concerts lately? Hey, not lately, but you know what I mean).

It’s also true that the Xbox Series X is selling just as fast most of the time, but we don’t know how much on sale there is compared to the PS5. Meanwhile, the PS5 has been declared the best-selling console in the history consoles, breaking the PS4 record according to Sony, even if we don’t have accurate totals yet.

Sony has finished trying to generate demand, that part is finished and now it is focused solely on supply. Yes, the pandemic affected this to some extent, but again, not enough where the PS5 couldn’t outsell the PS4 anyway, and by all accounts, by a decent margin.

The good news is, quite frankly, there just aren’t many reasons to have a next-gen console right now. There are only a handful of games that are only available on next-gen consoles, and those like Godfall should be skipped independently. And while many next-gen games have next-gen updates, others like Cyberpunk haven’t yet managed to optimize for new consoles, which should happen sometime in 2021. And in the case of Xbox, its flagship launch game, Halo. Infinite has now been pushed back a whole year until next fall.

Still, it’s maddening for potential customers who have been trying to get a PS5 since pre-orders in September and still haven’t managed to get one. The bots and resellers continue to rampage with little to stop them, and the stock situation is not improving. For now, it may be temporarily getting worse.

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