With AI ruining everything it touches and forcing us into having to maintain aging hardware so data centers can spring up around the globe and print infinity money for the already super-rich, it was only a matter of time before even simple technologies like games consoles became quite elusive even for relatively well-off players.
We’ve had several price spikes on all gaming hardware, with consoles like the PS5 Pro costing $900 at least pre-tax. Well, that is they should cost that much, but since they’re oftentimes unavailable and off the shelves, players have to settle for pre-owned options. And, as this listing from GameStop shows, pre-owned PS5 Pros are selling at the store for a grand total of $1329.99. For a console. With six-year-old hardware. Yikes.
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The console scarcity is apparently driven by two factors: one, the AI bubble mentioned above, and the imminent release of GTA 6, which will only be available on the Xbox and PlayStation for the foreseeable future. Rockstar’s newest title, and likely soon-to-be biggest game of all time, is coming out on Nov. 19, or in just over a month from the time of writing.
Players are apparently going haywire over that game and are buying up all the consoles they can so they could actually have a chance to play the title once it drops. This caused a massive sell-out spree across the US, but even at that point, I don’t see how GameStop calculated a price that’s $500 above a brand-new console.
Technological scarcity, whether artificial or real, is a fact of life nowadays, but we’ve sort of gotten used to these types of crises following the COVID-19 crypto boom that left us all out of a GPU for a few years. This too shall pass, or so they say, but not before leaving a big chunk of potential gamers in the dust or, well, with big holes in their pockets.
