The actual price of a PlayStation 5

This past week I was watching eBay, trying to decide whether to sell my PS5. I don’t dream of being a scalper, but it’s hard to ignore how much it costs. My daughter and I were beaten Astro boat And Miles Morales, So I thought I’d look into the resale market. Well, are they worth that much!

It’s not just the PlayStation 5 – I found that the Xbox Series X, S, Nvidia’s RTX 3090, 3080, 3070, 3060T graphics cards, and AMD’s rival RX6800 and 6800XT GPU all offer incredibly high prices in the resale market. . I’m not surprised how every big ticket holiday gaming gadget will sell when it is re – installed; Encouragement for scalpers is very high. They are superior to me, and those who buy one with the intention of using it will have to think twice. (That is capitalism for you.)

Example: The full-fat PlayStation 5 disk with disk drive retails at 499.99. But it is easily appreciated Double It’s on eBay: I The average selling price of a hundred ps5 to reach a street price is averaging, with a few sketchy littlers down 0 1,024. Understand, this is not a asking price: that’s what people actually pay for these consoles.

I ran the same numbers for the PS5 digital version and the new Xbox and six graphics cards. Here are the results:

I’m not throwing away an open box or used consoles to get to these numbers, and you’s easily able to see how strong the demand for the PS5 is: even the digital version of the PS5 (without the disk drive) is worth about the disk version that sells for over $ 100.

While scanning through it, I also found that it doesn’t need extra games, controllers or accessories: sometimes it’s enough to justify an extra $ 100 or $ 200, but a PS5 doesn’t need to rack K 1K or higher. (Some Xboxes with extra accessories seem to be priced at $ 50 to $ 100 more than others, but people are clearly buying for consoles.) This means that unless conditions change significantly, scalping will not stop immediately.

While there is a bright spot for console buyers, not every PS5 and Xbox listed on eBay sell, albeit a few. In terms of volume, the PS5 and the new Xbox moved about a thousand units on eBay on December 3 alone, but about the PS 1,000 PS5 and the $ 850 Xbox Series X listings ended without selling. (Most PS5 digital versions and the Xbox Series S seem to sell, but they are listed much lower than the disk-based models.)

On the PC side of things, the new Nvidia and AMD graphics cards are in incredibly short supply according to eBay listings. Almost every card I saw found a buyer, save the overpriced RTX 3090s – even there there were $ 2,400 and $ 2,500 sales.

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

The famine seems so real: on December 3, 100 RTX 3080 cards may change hands, even a few RTX 3070 cards, of which only 27 of the new AMD cards deceived eBay buyers back then.

As we have repeatedly discussed The Verge, It is now practically impossible to buy all these items in a real store for their retail price. If you are unlucky, have no connections, or are unwilling to pay for boats or scallops, you may not be able to find one – and retailers may not have the right incentives to fix it.

We’d like to assume that we’ve got some fast and expert clients on the staff, but many of us are still struggling to find a new GPU, PS5 or Xbox. Every opportunity to buy is a different shit show. “Coming soon” is always followed by “out of stock” and if we can get one that looks like our digital shopping cart, it will disappear before checkout. The December 2 launch of the Nvidia RTX3060T was no exception, with retailers failing to launch on time and going before others could actually see that they had stock.

Best Buy was a special joy:

Gamestop and Newgeg are having fun seeing these products “restart” – here it means “restock” Raises us in bundles with unnecessary extras. Can you blame eBay for showing that even those who buy based on current supply and demand will get the value of their money?

This pattern has been played several times before, and it is likely that the distribution will eventually catch on. Normally, these companies do not deliberately create famine, although I may have felt that way in early 2008 when I crammed into a freeze-in Best Buy parking space for a whole year for a Nintendo Wii. After That console launched.

But we are living in an unprecedented time, and companies like Microsoft and Nvidia may be signing up months before things end. I can’t remember a holiday with so many must-haves: either Tickle Mi Elmo, the early Power Rangers and the Nintendo Y were one-off!

I still lean against selling my PS5 on eBay; I like the idea of ​​trading it for an AMD RX6800 as I suggested in my review, but finding that GPU is not easy; I think I need most of the benefits I see from selling the console to buy a card on eBay.