eBay Scalpers Have Reportedly Made Around $10m From The Xbox Series X

**lotsofswearwords**

I literally care about this

It’s out of order, but like we and suppliers didn’t know this was going to happen.
The only thing to stop it is that suppliers ensure there is enough stock available and they replenish stock more quickly.
I.e if they had delayed launch until say April 2021 thats over four months of full production, for more stock. I personally think it was all a bit rushed, even games being ready indicated that and of course Covid didn’t help.

It baffles the mind that in this day and age, with SO many ways to track and connect sales to addresses and individuals, these kinds of maleficent practices are still possible.

Now, I don't mind the odd individual making and actually receiving their double preorder and then making a little profit off of selling the surplus item, but people that buy much more consoles than they'll ever need, only to disadvantage poor saps who are stupid or simplistic enough to do anything to get their hands on one, need to be financially castrated, at the VERY least.

If I really were Thanos, I'd most definitely snap all of these sob's out of existence, without even spending a micro-second doubting that decision.

I'm baffled how people can turn on their heated toilet seats from across the globe but we can't verify and limit someone buying a product online. Distributors simply don't care so they do nothing about it.

It’s the people who are paying their asking price that’s causing the scalpers to continue, shops will get more stock and the prices will drop. If you pay for a scalped console then you’re just stupid

This is disgusting.

But until the console manufacturers actually release a console AFTER they’ve already made enough or stupid people quit paying outrageous prices from these scalpers, this will never change.

All this points out is people are too impatient and stupid with their money. I'm quite happy to wait until the first or second price drop.

@AJDarkstar Well, that's exactly what I meant: I'm okay with people making double preorders (per item/console, so your example still falls within these limits) to make sure that they'll get their hands on something, and then either canceling the second one or selling it with or without profit, but as soon as you start binging and wholesaling them, all bets are off, far as I'm concerned.

I'm not sure who's worse the scalper scum or the clowns buying from the scum

I've been tracking down a series X through multiple websites and eventually managed to get one from the Italian Microsoft store mid November. Delivered to UK two days later. It takes a lot of effort but a lot of stores are randomly dropping stocks here and there, I would suggest to subscribe to stockinformer if you're in the UK. Yes, it takes a lot of time and luck, but it's doable. For me these people are arms stolen from the agriculture. Been laid off? So I was, go out and get a bloody job.

@Krzzystuff Electric toilet seats? Now THAT'S a fantastic idea! Yes, yes!

@ThanosReXXX @AJDarkstar yeah, what i don't want though is some limit one per household thing. Some of us buy two for two people but are the only one set up to chase preorders.

Still ticked at Sony's psvr usb adapter being limit one (free) per household... And they don't sell them otherwise. So what's the second psvr owner supposed to do?

@Medic_Alert exactly this. Though I'm betting next time the solution is charge $750 at launch and lower prices the following year to reduce demand.

@NEStalgia It's one per each PSVR unit, you tell them serial code of your PSVR unit and they send you adapter.

@AJDarkstar True, but I only point fingers at the mass market scalpers, not the average Joe who buys two or three consoles.

@NEStalgia Hey, no argument there. Then again: I already made my point...

@AJDarkstar Yeah the bots get around that stuff. I don't even mind each retailer limiting one per customer, but if a "better" centralized system were put in place for preorders I'd fear it would be locked per household rather than per account or some such.

And yeah the PSVR thing...I don't even care if they restrict it to one for free...but at least let me buy the darned thing! It can't cost more than $10. Or $20 in Sony Dollars.

@justpassingby It specifies very clearly "one per household" - have you successfully seen more than one S/N per household receive one?

@AJDarkstar Maybe if I pretend I also preordered Cyberpunk they'll take pity on me and do it?

That ShopTo method you described sounds like a pretty good system. It lets the hardcore get their spots reserved super early before the world takes notice, but prevents everyone having to plug into MS/Sony "Central command" for some platform-managed sales program.

I also think, at least for non-retailer direct sales, allowing existing customers with existing verified player accounts to order first would go a long way as well. Sony half-way got there with their registration, but they had too few, and did it wrong - not as a first come, first served, or even a lottery but by some shady, undisclosed vetting of who they "wanted" to give the system to. Some people on the NL sites did get that invite....I had two active accounts in the house and neither got picked. If they were going by player scores, I'd have failed - I don't trophy hunt and have trash scores on all platforms. But if they were going by purchase history I have a pretty massive library. Not as big on PS as XB by far, but still a vast digital library. Albeit a lot of JRPGs and VNs they don't care about anymore. But you'd think anyone with a Vita and PS3 Phat on their account would automatically qualify as the Playstation ultra-hardcore.

@AJDarkstar I get that the bottleneck with that kind of preodrer system is primarily how to not screw over retail partners with a direct sales only model..... But I'm sure they can figure ways out. Vouchers or something.

But yeah they really, especially at Sony don't seem interested in placating fans, looking mostly at their total global numbers and "average" customer purely on a revenue basis. Ms seems more keen on pleasing fans, if only because they don't have the large mass market to afford ignoring us

@AJDarkstar I assume that it's the same reason dev kits went out late. They had to wait for amd to finalize the rdna2 stuff before they could do to production so they could only crank so many out before launch to miss launch to Sony.

Otoh that's my main problem with ps5 at this point is a lot of the magic tech they keep trying to peddle didn't actually have a reason to exist, including that creative but rediculous ssd.... They r&d'd all their own tech for the sole purpose of beating ms to market before the standards on general purpose parts was finalized. The machine itself is an architectural ode to business strategy rather than intended tech. (The idea that after market ssds that work will actually be faster overall, but run at the same speed as their clustered flash implies the special tech isn't special, standard high end ssds will surpass it within months, the whole design was just a creative way to beat the real deal to market and make consumers pay for the market advantage.)

In a lot of regions though i think it's just brand establishment. Uk is just ps territory, and Sega before that. Hard to break momentum like that. I'm curious how the numbers stack in the us where ms is traditionally strongest. A lot of it is just ps4 was popular and back commpat means why switch? But once exclusives arrive that may change. Could be a few years though.

But it's interesting that in the us I've seen target and walmart bith running holiday ads featuring the hot holiday items. Both featured xsx. I've had contests in my inbox from more than one, not consumer, but professional service trying virtual conference attendence or other engagement with entering to win an xsx.

I've yet to see one ps5 promotional outside the food ones.

I think it's a very different market here. Xbox here seems almost like Nintendo does in Japan, though not due to a nationalistic bent and just due to xbox having always been popular here.

Sony played the business game well, though they clearly didn't bother with the os. No market advantage to be had from that i guess.

@AJDarkstar They did. That's why most of the footage we saw both at MS and third party for XSX games were running on target-spec PC builds rather than on actual XSX hardware or devkits leading to the PS fan "we haven't seen one game running on an XSX" meme over the summer.

And also part of why the optimization has been kinda trash on launch titles (plus I think devs aren't caring that much about XB because it's the lower seller and not a huge power gain unlike with 1X vs Pro.)

The PS5 SSD is marketing bluster, and they themselves tell us so right in the spec. That's the funny thing. It's not that it isn't fast or faster than the XSX SSD. It certainly is. It's that that special, contrived "Cernydrive" concoction isn't some amazing thing that only Sony was able to achieve despite the marketing. Otherwise they'd be selling proprietary drives, it would be the only way to run games on PS5 at the expected speed of the internal.

But no, they put a slot in that runs the even faster standard mass market drives. They "have to be faster than theirs" to run games at the same speed because it can't use the internal controller. But what does that still tell us? It means their drive is slower than the incoming mass market PC drives and the clustering and custom controller exists to use multiple slow flash modules in paralell to approximate (but still underperform) what the incoming mass market drives can do.

A.K.A. a very complicated way to use cheaper, already available flash to get to market fast to beat the much better (and maybe reduce production costs long-term) drives to market by a few months.

Long-term, yes, they do have the HDD speed advantage. But the proprietary drive bares out to be little more than a placeholder until the actual tech arrives from other vendors, rather than just waiting until the tech they wanted is available.

My prediction is unless their custom silicon makes it much cheaper to produce their own storage than to purchase storage modules externally, PS5 Slim won't have the Cernydrive at all, it'll just use a stock NVMe4 solution from a bulk vendor.

The one limitation we see with PS5's storage is that with their custom drive, the way it works, unless a game is built for the new APIs that use the new storage in the multichannel mode, it's actually slower than the XSX's SSD (meaning single channel runs slower than NVMe3 on PS5's drive.) Meaning PS5 PS4BC doesn't get nearly the I/O boost it should, and gets less than X1 games do on XSX. PS5 games get that "NVMe4" speed and have faster I/O than XSX. But it's not due to the magic of Cernydrive. Cernydrive just uses a software trick to paralel task across 12 otherwise slow-ish flash chips to simulate NVMe4 speeds.....until we can throw a real NVMe4 drive in and just use that instead.

It's clever, but it's marketed as a great invention rather than a time and/or cost cutting workaround to the actual solution. Which the machine also includes (sold separately.)

Marketing is marketing...but...they even had me going for a while with that until I realized that. The fact they themselves tell you a stock NVMe4 drive runs faster, and runs games at the same speed (and I'm betting runs BC faster) - tells us their own drive isn't actually a useful invention (for us.)

At the bottom line, yes, PS5 has faster storage, for new-gen games, than XSX, the marketing isn't misleading that. But their proprietary drive isn't the reason. That just let them launch sooner (or cheaper) than the real parts would have allowed. If you could rip that Cernydrive out of a PS5 and run only on the NVMe4 supported drives, it's likely performance would be better across the board (same or better for new games, better for BC games) than the proprietary one as long as they don't throttle it or limit the IO on it at all. Just a marketing slight of hand. Proprietary is sexier than "clever workaround NVMe4 placeholder until other companies make those available."

If we remove pretentious marketing bluster, and ignore that the Cernydrive exists to race to market before the industry standard arrives, we end up with "XSX uses NVMe3, PS5 uses NVMe4." yes, that means PS5 has much faster storage (not available for BC on PS5 using the internal storage though).

Of course only exclusives can truly design around that NVMe4 drive since XB doesn't have it, and PC will be a long time away before that speed can be counted on as required. It won't affect the design of Assassin's Creed or Battlefield, because it can't. They can use it, but not design around it.

The US doesn't do nationalism on that level of sales outside things like the steel industry. There's factions of the population that have some interest in that to a degree that doesn't extend to electronics. Mostly we just want cheap. Not value. Cheap. It's been our bane for decades. If given the choice between two items, and the clearly taped together rickety one is $0.20 less, that's the one that'll sell out. Walmart made their empire being $0.10 cheaper, regularly. Heck, they're not technically wrong. I saved a whole $0.99 over MSRP by buying my XSX at Walmart. Only $499 rather than $499.99. We're that cheap.

Uh supply and demand right? Just wait. The fake prestige of owning the latest electric fun brick will fade and then you can buy your own. If you are on this site you likely have a fun brick or a tappy slab full of games you have not beaten yet.

Personally I won’t be jumping in until 2023. If they are still scarce then I’ll admit we have a problem.

People build hype around these things like they cure cancer so like with any vice opportunistic people turn a profit. This is the cycle we have built.