Four months ago, Sony launched its latest video game console, the PlayStation 5. The company sold 4.5 million units during the launch quarter – an impressive figure for a console that seems impossible to buy.
I want one. But I can’t find one. There are deficiencies. There are money changers charging up to $ 1,000 for a $ 400 to $ 500 console. There are digital display cases crumbling under the massive and relentless demand of the PS5. There is a subculture dedicated to purchasing the console, because there is still no reliable way to get your hands on one of these things. You refresh the web page; you roll the dice. It’s the tennis drop that never ends, even though the tennis drop is pale compared to the nonsense at the launch of the PlayStation 5. Tennis drops are competitive opportunities to buy collectibles produced in a definite and limited amount . The launch of the PlayStation 5 is a competitive opportunity to purchase a hardware update (assuming the current ownership of a PlayStation 4) that will not be particularly scarce in the long run and is not particularly useful right now.
The most attractive PlayStation 5 exclusive, Deathloop, will be released in May – six months after the console’s launch. The latest edition of the acclaimed Final Fantasy VII remake arrives in June. In all, there are less than a dozen other next generation exclusives being launched this year. Meanwhile, PlayStation 4 remains a popular choice for playing the most popular games of 2021, including multi-generation titles that can be purchased later on PS5. Immediate improvements over the previous PlayStation are quite common: a new user interface, faster load times and better graphics. Is nothing! But they are not the most urgent reasons for abandoning the PS4 – a perfectly good console, hardly as obsolete as the overwhelming demand for its successor might suggest.
The closest comparison to this current craze for consoles is the launch of Nintendo in the spring of 2017 for its portable platform, the Switch. Notably, Nintendo’s previous console, the Wii U, was a commercial failure. So the Switch and its main release title, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild– now widely considered to be one of the best games of its generation – ran to fill an obvious gap in the market. Breath of the Wild largely justified the desperate search for a switch at launch. The PlayStation 5 so far seems to be largely an avenue for influence and memes.
The initial scarcity of state-of-the-art video game consoles, especially during vacation launches, is nothing new. I know the scarcity of consoles since the launch of the PlayStation 2 in October 2000, which made Walmarts a mess on Black Friday. What the PS2 lacked in killer release titles, it made up for in vastly improved graphics and responsiveness of the controller, which allowed game developers to create much more ambitious worlds, characters and stories. The same could be said about the leap from the Super Nintendo to the Nintendo 64. These consoles may initially have attracted consumers with eye-catching hardware specifications, but their impact on content and narrative is ultimately more profound. Will the relatively small PS5 updates consolidate a similar legacy?
The current shortage of the PlayStation 5 lasted until spring, with analysts warning that the underlying shortage of semiconductors “will get worse before it gets better in 2021”. In the meantime, social media, game publications and national news sites add up to a huge real-time tracker for the sporadic and ephemeral quantities of new stocks from major retailers. This is not the only new gaming hardware to meet insatiable demand in recent months. Microsoft released the Xbox Series X / S two days before the PS5, and Nvidia released its GeForce 30 series graphics cards for PC players a month before the console’s launch. Both products continue to sell out. In the early months of the pandemic, Nintendo struggled to keep up with demand for the Switch. There is a big appetite for new gaming hardware in general. But the PlayStation 5 is distinguished by the durability of its market dominance and the size of its hype. It is on its way to becoming the best-selling video game console of all time, although it is almost impossible to buy months after its release.
Given the pandemic, Sony restricted retailers to online sales only at the launch of the PlayStation 5. That’s when the problems started. Sony, Amazon, Best Buy, Target and GameStop frustrated consumers in peculiar ways. Best Buy ejected the console from the carts during checkout. Amazon sold all consoles before it even published the list; Twitter users circulated links that went around the window and sent the user straight to the checkout with an unlisted console mysteriously added to the cart. The sites crashed. Worse yet, the sites worked slowly, but sensibly, to process pre-orders and sales until the last stages of checkout – and then they crashed. Sony apologized. But four months later, retailers and consumers are more or less where they started: emphasizing the unstable web infrastructure and fragile supply chains that continue to fold under the huge demand for new consoles. “In many ways,” said a financial advisor The New York Times, “They don’t want to satisfy the demand initially. They want to have a continuous gap between supply and demand. […] They want to have excitement and enthusiasm for a long period of time. “
In other words, this is how these releases work now. It is embedded in the culture of video games.
What, then, is the real impetus to overcome so many obstacles and buy a PS5 anytime soon? There is some perverse gamification in the process: assessing leaks, updating websites, comparing notes with the rest of the internet and reveling (albeit unwillingly) in uncertainty. And that’s only if you haven’t already bought a PlayStation 5. I can only imagine the catharsis that someone gets after buying one. It must be a bit like overcoming a final boss in the hard way.