Does this officially settle the debate of how big the scalper/bot problem has become?
I still see a fair percentage of people arguing that Bots aren't a big portion of the perceived supply/demand problem.
It seems to me the evidence is growing that this is an unprecedented situation in which gamers are indeed being out-competed by Bots to some significant degree and that while demand for new consoles would be high and exacerbated by the pandemic (with more people staying in looking to upgrade consoles and GPUs), when we factor in Bots its just a crazy situation in which the ability to secure any given product right now is made several times harder than it should be.
This doesn't prove anything. It might actually prove bots are not a problem because most are being blocked. I looked at PS5 inventory on ebay last week ish. There were roughly 10k listings, some of which were fake, and 100k completed listings, many of which did not sell or were shill bid up and not paid for. But at worst that meant 100k units being scalped on ebay which should account for most.
While there have been no numbers on PS5 sales, it was stated that they are better than PS4. PS4 supposedly sold 1 million units in launch week in the US. The PS5 has been out for a month. I think we can assume they sold through 1 million units.
So ebay is less than 10% of total PS5 inventory. Craigslist, Amazon, Facebook other sites all have some scalped inventory so ebay numbers alone are not good enough, but my point is, if scalping bots is such a problem, why is ebay inventory so low? The units are not all selling out either. Many are BuyItNow priced higher than auctions.
It really looks like the big issue here is supply not meeting demand, not scalpers making a quick buck off of a minority fraction of the inventory. Do you have numbers that tell a different story?
Best Buy was selling units this week. They had everyone in their home store's region competing for 1 or 2 units for what appeared to be 2 or 3 opportunities. Best buy has a little less than 1000 stores. They were trying to sell what looked to be something like 5,000 systems. I live between Annapolis and Baltimore so I think the numbers I saw are a good average but for the sake of argument it could be more or less units. 5k is less than all the inventory on ebay and their site couldn't handle the traffic. Bots can't really help in that system but could account for some of the slowing down.
The market for a new PS5 in the US is enormous. Scalpers are taking some of the inventory and flipping it, but from what I can tell, that amount is safely less than 20%, probably less than 10%. The scalpers are buying them all narrative is driven by anecdotes and the desire to scapegoat someone.