PS5 Restocks Are Getting a Little Easier, But Don't Expect Relief Soon
Restocks at Best Buy and Walmart are more frequent, but the global chip shortage means PS5 and Xbox Series X supply will likely stay tight into 2022.
If you’ve been refreshing Best Buy or Walmart’s PS5 restock pages for the past four months, you already know the drill: a drop goes live, Twitter lights up, and the “add to cart” button turns into “sold out” before most people can even load the page. That routine hasn’t changed this week, but there is a small silver lining — drops are happening more often than they were back in December and January. That’s not nothing, even if it doesn’t feel like much when you’re one of the thousands of people staring at an error page.
Sony says production is ramping up
Sony CEO Jim Ryan has been fairly candid about the situation, acknowledging that supply is still constrained while insisting manufacturing is ramping up behind the scenes. I believe him, for what it’s worth — nobody at Sony wants to leave demand this obviously unmet during the best possible launch window a console has ever had. The problem isn’t willingness, it’s capacity, and capacity is tangled up in a supply chain issue that’s bigger than any one company.
That issue is the global semiconductor shortage, and it’s not specific to game consoles. Automakers have been idling factory lines over the same chip crunch, and everything from laptops to graphics cards is feeling the squeeze. When demand for chips spikes across every category at once — cars, phones, GPUs, consoles, appliances — foundries simply can’t expand output fast enough to catch up. Building new fabrication capacity takes years, not months, so this isn’t a problem that gets solved with a press release.
Analysts tracking the situation are warning that console supply could stay tight well into 2022. That’s a rough headline if you were hoping to just casually buy a PS5 sometime this summer. It also means the current pattern — infrequent drops, instant sellouts, resellers scooping up units with bots — is probably the norm for a while longer, not a temporary launch hiccup.
Xbox isn’t faring any better
Worth noting: this isn’t a Sony-specific story. Xbox Series X units are just as hard to find right now, hitting the same restock-and-vanish cycle at the same retailers. Microsoft hasn’t said much publicly beyond acknowledging demand is high, but the underlying cause is identical — they’re competing for the same constrained pool of chips as everyone else, including Sony, and including the auto industry that’s leaning on governments for help securing supply.
For shoppers, the practical advice hasn’t really changed since launch day: turn on notifications from restock-tracking accounts, be ready to check out fast, and don’t count on walking into a store and finding one on a shelf. If you can be flexible about which retailer and which SKU (digital vs. disc), your odds go up a bit.
The more interesting question is what this means longer-term for the console generation as a whole. A shortage that persists into next year could shape everything from pricing to first-party release schedules to how aggressively either company pushes cross-gen support for PS4 and Xbox One. Nobody’s forecasting that explicitly yet, but it’s the kind of thing worth watching as 2021 goes on.