The true value of the PlayStation 5

This past week I was looking at eBay, trying to decide if I should sell my PS5. I don’t dream of creating boredom, but it’s getting harder to ignore how much it costs. My daughter and I were beaten Astro Butt And Miles Morales, So I thought I’d peek into the resale market. Wow, they are very valuable!

And it’s not just the PlayStation 5 – I found out that the Xbox Series X and S, Nvidia’s RTX 3090, 3080, 3070, and 3060 TI graphics cards, and AMD’s rivals the RX 6800 and 6800 XT GPUs all have incredible highs on the resale market. Commands prices. . It no longer surprises me that every big ticket holiday gaming gadget sells instantly whenever re-stocked; The incentive for scalpers is just too high. They are also very high people like me, who have bought the person who wants to use it, they have to think twice. (It’s capitalism for you.)

Example: A full-fledged PlayStation 5 with a disk drive is retail for $ 499.99. But it’s easily worth it Double Or on eBay: I To reach the street price of the price of, excluding some sketchy outliers, the actual final selling price of the Hundred PS5 is average 0 1,024. Mind you, it’s not worth asking: these are the people who actually pay for this console.

I ran the same numbers for the PS5 Digital Edition, the new Xbox and all six graphics cards. Here are the results:

I haven’t used any open box boxes or consoles to get these numbers, and you can easily see how strong the demand for PS5 is in particular: PS5 Digital Edition (without disk drive) is worth as much as the disk version That’s retail for 100 more.

While scanning, I also noticed that it wasn’t necessary to include extra games, controllers, or accessories: sometimes it was enough to justify an extra $ 100 or $ 200, but the PS5 didn’t need to rack up $ 1 or more. (Some Xboxes with extra accessories seem to cost 50 to $ 100 more than others, but people are obviously buying themselves for the console.) All of this means that unless the situation changes drastically, scalping won’t stop soon.

If there’s one bright spot for console buyers, it’s that not every PS5 and Xbox listed on eBay actually sell, even if there are a few. In terms of volume, the PS5 and the new Xbox each went around 1,000 units on eBay on December 3rd alone, but some. The 1,000 PS5 and Box 850 Xbox Series X lists the watch without selling. (Most PS5 digital editions and Xbox Series S seem to be sold, but many less are listed than disc-based models.)

On the PC side of things, the new Nvidia and AMD graphics cards seem to be in an incredibly short supply via eBay listed. I found a buyer in almost every single card I saw, save the very expensive RTX 3090 – and even there, the નું 1,400 and $ 2,500 sold for only $ 1,500 GPU.

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

The shortage seems very real: maybe a hundred RTX 3080 cards changed hands on December 3rd, even fewer RTX 3070 cards, and only 27 new EMD cards that day brought down eBay buyers.

As we have repeatedly discussed Edge, It is practically impossible to buy all these items right now at the actual store for their retail price. Unless you’re lucky, have connections, or are willing to pay for bots or scalpers, you probably won’t find one – and retailers don’t have the right incentives to fix it.

We think we’ve got some fast, savvy bargains on the staff, but many of us are still struggling to find a new GPU, PS5 or Xbox. Each and every opportunity to buy is another shit show. “Coming Soon” is immediately followed by “Out Stock”, and if we really manage to get into our digital shopping cart in the blink of an eye, it often disappears before checkout. The launch of the December 2D Nvidia RTX 3060 TI was no exception, with retailers failing to launch on time and others going before they even said they were actually in stock.

Best Buy was a special pleasure:

It’s also fun to see GameStop and Navage “re-stock” these products – where “restocks” occur. Upselling us on bundles with unwanted extras. Can you blame them, however, even when eBay shows that buyers can get the value of their money based on current supply and demand?

This pattern has played out many times before, and it is likely that the supply will eventually run out. In general, these companies do not intentionally lack, even if it seems to me as early as 2008, when I camped in a full year Best Buy Parking for the Nintendo Wii Then That console started.

But we are living in an unprecedented time right now, with companies like Micro .ft and Nvidia hinting that it could be months before things get out of hand. I don’t remember the holiday season with a lot of these things, either: Tickle Me Elmo, the early Power Rangers, and those Nintendo Wii were usually one-offs!

I’m still hesitant to sell my PS5 on eBay; I like the idea of ​​trading for the AMD RX6800, as I suggested in my review, but it’s not easy to find a GPU; It seems that to buy a card even on eBay I need most of the benefits seen from selling a console.