In the midst of late 2020, holiday shoppers faced one of the biggest disappointments of the season: the inability to get their hands on the newly released PlayStation 5.
A global chip shortage, caused by the Covid pandemic, led to only a limited number of game consoles for sale. Consumers were left furious when they faced crashing websites when trying to buy the PS5 and encountered even more limited stock due to scalper bots automatically purchasing consoles in bulk.
But according to Sony, this holiday season will be a complete 360 from the debacle that took place three years ago. In a recent interview with Barron’s, Sony executive Eric Lempel said that the company is expecting historical holiday sales for consoles.
“We’ve had consoles a bit here and there over the last three holidays, but this is the first time we’re in full supply and we’re thrilled about that,” he said. “Our outlook on PlayStation 5 is really strong. We’re expecting one of the strongest seasons in our history in terms of console sales.”
In the meantime, it looks like this means that this will be more bad news for scalpers who during the shortage sold their stock of PS5 consoles at inflated prices to consumers who were itching to get their hands on the limited supply.
In April, it was reported that scalpers were having trouble selling PlayStation 5 consoles, as a user on Reddit pointed out that they were being sold for prices as low as $400 due to the lack of demand.
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The lack of demand was most likely due to Sony’s recovery from the chip shortage, leading to a rapid increase in supply of the console. The company sold 3.3 million PS5 consoles in the first quarter of 2023, which is a large increase compared to the 2.4 million units sold in 2022 during the same time last year.
While speaking with CNBC earlier this week, Lempel said that Sony was on track to reach its target of selling 25 million PS5 units throughout 2023.
