When the PlayStation 5 launches this holiday season, it can be hard to find.
“There will be a limited number of PS5 consoles available for pre-order,” Sony announced Wednesday night.
The company has set up a lottery system for customers interested in pre-ordering the console: Enter your PlayStation Network ID on this page, and hope for the best.
“We will invite some of our existing consumers to be one of the first to pre-order one from PlayStation,” the company said. With “previous interests and PlayStation activities”, the company will determine who can pre-order the PlayStation 5.
The console can also be pre-ordered from at least one major video game retailer: GameStop. A rep for the largest video game retailer in the world confirmed Thursday morning in an email that it would offer PlayStation 5 pre-orders.
Production of next-gen game consoles from Sony and Microsoft has been going on for months, with both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles scheduled to launch this holiday season.
Sony doubles its production request for the next console: Manufacturers are expected to produce 10 million PlayStation 5 consoles by March 2021, a 100% increase over previously reported production numbers. This increase is said to be a measure of the increasing demand from consumers for video games, as the coronavirus pandemic is affecting people all over the world.
Despite this increase in production, the console’s supply will remain limited in the coming holiday season.
Sony has yet to announce the release date or price of the PlayStation 5. The console was first unveiled in mid-June.
Sony
It comes in two versions: There’s a standard PlayStation 5, with an Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive, and a Digital Edition without a disc drive, the company said in a press release.
Design-wise, the two consoles are very similar.
As shown above, the digital edition is symmetrical, while the standard edition has a bump where the disk drive sits.
It is unclear what the price difference will be between the two versions, but the functional difference is obvious: The digital model cannot read discs, while the standard model can. In practice, this means that the digital version can only play downloaded games.
Sony representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
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