Getting your hands on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X is a big challenge this holiday season. Not only are consumers competing against each other, they are also competing against bots and resellers who hope to benefit from the new console shortage. A bot, which you can see on Twitch, can help a little. It is checking the stock at various ret online retailers every second.
The Twitch Channel is run by Krum Ritz, who used a publicly available program called StreetMerchant – dubbed “the world’s easiest, most powerful stock checker” – on Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, NewJag, Walmart on PS5. And to inspect the Xbox Series X console, and other retailers. Watching the flow is currently the great wall of despair; Hundreds of updates every minute show “out of stock” everywhere.
Ritz told Polygon that some of his viewers had snatched the console by observing its flow. “I did this to help others and to be honest,” Ritz said in a direct Twitter message. “[I] Good luck last night, though one of the guys was getting one [Sam’s Club], And yesterday some people got lucky with getting Xbox Series X from Gamestop. “
Ritz said he had already built a console when the pre-order went live, and could add more retailers to his watch list. Interestingly, Ritz is also looking at other sources for the stock: Twitter user Wario64, Which frequently notifies their followers of the PS5 and Xbox Series X at various retailers.
Even if you don’t create a new console thanks to this bot – which, incidentally, you can run yourself – there’s some comfort in watching real-time feeds that reinforce how hard it is to find someone right now.
