Scalpers have been taking advantage of low supply and high demand for next-gen consoles, and doesn’t look like it’s going to get better anytime soon.
The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S launched just over a month ago, and they’re still very hard to come by at face value. The shortages have even lead to some questionable business practices.
The phenomenon of scalping, or selling hot items for inflated prices, has been irritating potential customers for weeks now.
A new study conducted by a data engineer has shed some light on just how profitable scalping new hardware has been. The results are staggering.
Scalpers PS5 & Xbox Series X Profits By The Numbers
Over 60,000 next-gen consoles were sold on eBay alone. This includes 25,642 PS5 consoles, 7,322 PS5 Digital Edition consoles, 6,863 Xbox Series S consoles, and 22,932 Xbox Series X consoles.
The PS5 has been dominating the sales charts. It launched at $499 for the version with the disc drive and at $399 for an Digital Edition. Through December 1, 33 thousand PS5s were sold on ebay.
The full fat disc version had a median price of $1,021, while the Digital Edition had a median price of $937. In total, this means scalpers made a total of $19 million in profit.
For Microsoft’s machine, the Xbox Series X launched at a MSRP of $499. The cut down Series S launched at $299. Again, through December 1, 30 thousand Xbox’s were sold on ebay.
The median price for the Series X was $865, while the median price for the Series S was $469. According to the study, scalpers made almost $10 million in profit.
It’s obvious that resellers are making huge margins, but what about ebay and PayPal? Michael Driscoll, the data engineer who conducted the study, added more information on a subreddit page.
He stated that ‘eBay got about $6.6 million,’ while PayPal made about $2.4 million from not only the new consoles, but new PC GPUs and CPUs as well. It’s worth noting that these numbers only account for the time up until the time of publication for the original article (2nd December, 2020).
Driscoll stated that he hasn’t gotten around to updating the new numbers yet.
