Estimates suggest that reselling next gen consoles and new PC cards on eBay has made scalpers over £61 million in revenues this year.
We’re barely a week away from Christmas and there’s still no sign of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 being back in stock anywhere in the UK, which means the chances of getting one at the last minute has all but passed.
Unless, that is, you decide to buy one for inflated prices on eBay, where plenty of consoles are still in stock – with PlayStation 5s going for at least £700 and Xbox Series X for around the same.
Scalpers, as they’re known, have already boasted of making massive amounts of money this year and now a user on website DEV has calculated that the figure could stand at $82 million (£61.5 million) when you also include recently released, and equally scarce, new PC graphics cards.
Data engineer Michael Driscoll created a script to pull in all the sold listings for consoles and the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 PC cards up until December 1.
His results showed that during that period 32,964 PlayStation 5 consoles have been sold (25,642 standard editions and 7,322 Digital Editions) and 29,795 Xbox Series X/S (22,932 Xbox Series X and 6,863 Xbox Series S).
Although eBay has not released any official figures, rival reseller website StockX recently told Business Insider that the site had sold ‘more than 60,000’ next gen consoles, with PlayStation 5 accounting for 62% of its sales.
Sony and Microsoft have offered little comment on the situation, with no attempts by them to prevent scalpers and no clear indication of when the stock issue will be resolved.
Microsoft has warned that shortages could last until at least April, with the PlayStation 5 likely to be difficult to acquire until at least the same time.
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