PS5 and Xbox Series X Scalpers Have Made Millions of Dollars
Next-gen consoles are promising to usher in an all-new era of gaming, but some players are finding it hard to get their hands on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S since the systems' respective releases. Along with limited hardware supplies and the relative ease of disrupting digital retail outlets with too much traffic, another barrier to obtaining these systems has appeared in the form of scalpers ordering thousands of next-gen consoles and selling them for outrageous prices.
According to Oracle Data Engineer Michael Driscoll, this practice has been excessively successful for the opportunistic people scraping up every order for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S they can. By tracking sales records for these consoles and applying variable data, such as the methods some of these scalpers are using to scoop up next-gen tech and metering out the prices with the costs of the process, Driscoll has found a relatively accurate model for the practice's profits.
In the case of Sony and Microsoft's next-gen consoles, the data shows that scalpers have accumulated a collective $58 million in sales since preorders for the systems began. The majority of this has been a result of reselling PS5 consoles, which accounts for over $34 million of the total sales, with Xbox Series X/S accounting for an estimated $23 million in comparison. As for the total profits once accounting for the cost of managing these scalping enterprises, the practice has amassed a full $29 million in profitable earnings from the next-gen consoles, but Driscoll's data doesn't end there.
Looking even further into all of the new tech that has launched in 2020, Driscoll also analyzed the selling rates of new hardware like Nvidia's GeForce RTX 30 series and AMD's Zen 3 CPU. The total sales for the 14 products that Driscoll investigated came out to over $82 million since September, with $39 million of that being pure profit for the scalpers. This is the cumulative effort of multiple scalper groups posting Xbox Series X/S and PS5 systems for extraordinary prices on eBay and through other public selling websites.
The data collection concluded on December 2nd, with Driscoll having most recently updated his initial findings on dev.to as late as December 7th. So, it is entirely possible that thousands more overpriced PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles have sold since this data was collected, putting the collective total well under the previous $82 million figure. However, that is of course if scalpers don't get tricked by fake customers looking for the Xbox Series X/S or PS5 in their attempt to throttle the supplies to average customers.
The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S are available now at most major retailers.
Source: dev.to
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