Getting Sony’s Playstation 5 has been a colossal pain. Between the chip shortages and the scalpers, the regular person really has to be quick to snag their own.
Over the past few months, I’ve been keeping an eye on sites claiming to help consumers. Some are just scams to get your credit card. A few were really scummy get-rich-quick schemes selling you a secret tip.
You wanna know what that tip is? Email Sony’s PR and say you’re a “journalist” who wants a copy to review for a blog. Yes, they want you to commit fraud.
Or you could go the other way and use the current sociopolitical climate to shame Sony as a certain e-celeb did, but you’re not a piece of trash, are you?
Matt Swider the editor-in-chief of Tech Radar.
Matt’s informants were often spot on, allow him to give potential buyers the heads up as to when a restock of both the PS5 and XBOX X consoles would drop. The catch is being fast on that mouse and keyboard.
To test out Matt’s validity, I would stay logged into the sites that would allegedly get the restocks. These would be Walmart, Amazon, Target, and Gamestop. There are others, like Dell and Sam’s Club, but the frequency wasn’t as often as the previously mentioned retailers.
There is also a shuffle over at NewEgg that has the PS5 listed. You enter the shuffle during a certain time during the day, and a few hours later, names are drawn. If you win, you must purchase the item within a certain timeframe. Simple, but not as direct.
Now, back to the online retailer rat race.
Drops would come around mid-day or early afternoon. Some, like the one today was announced in the early evening. As soon as I’d get an alert about his tweet, I’d click the link and see if the item could be added to my cart.
3 out of 10 times, it would work. Keep in mind that some retailers like Walmart will put you into a “waiting room” while their stock cycles, which could take up to 15 minutes in some cases.
Even though the item is in your cart, that doesn’t mean it is in stock. The only real way to know for sure is once the transaction is complete, most of the time. I’ve seen responses to his tweet saying the order was canceled within 24 hours due to shortages.
When the rush is on, don’t be surprised to see these retailer websites crash or slow to a crawl as scalpers, their bots, and untold thousands if not millions of people dash for the hard-to-find consoles.
We managed to get to the very end during our experiments and successfully order two PS5 consoles. The caveat was that they were the $700-$800 bundles. The stand-alone systems sell out in under 2 seconds from what we’ve seen, and we have never successfully been able to add those to our carts.
So, out of all the various ways, it looks like Swider‘s Twitter is the way to go. Not only could we validate a successful order on our part, but several people responded to him with proof of their own:
🥳I see success for GameStop PS5 / Xbox Series X restock!
😅Persistent > ⏲️Speed
👉PS5 bundles https://t.co/VRX42vM02H
👉Xbox bundles https://t.co/mjG5KZFhjSThere's 100% still time to cart a console BUNDLE. If you saw sold out before, it was too early. Try, try again! https://t.co/H2iNOQANuZ
— Matt Swider (tracking PS5 / Xbox / GPU restock) (@mattswider) May 26, 2021
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