PS5 stock UK trends on Twitter as fans voice frustration with PlayStation over lack of console availability

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

PS5 fans are taking to social media to complain about the ongoing issues with actually buying one of the new consoles.

The new PlayStation was released in mid-November but has been largely impossible to buy ever since, with the small amounts of stock that do appear selling out almost immediately.

The demand for the console has also led to a flourishing market among resellers, who are able to use automated systems to buy any consoles that do appear on retailers’ websites, and then sell them on again at vastly inflated prices.

The hashtag “#PS5StockUK” trended across Twitter in the country on Tuesday as fans voiced their frustration.

Such a topic is usually filled with fans sharing tips about where the console might be going on sale, or suggestions of rumoured restocks.

But the tweets shared on Tuesday were almost the opposite: fans annoyed they couldn’t find any consoles at all, and some urging that people are careful where they are bought from.

One post, retweeted nearly 100 times, urged that people don’t buy the consoles “until we have stable stock and let the scalpers sit with thousands of consoles they can't move”. “We have to work together,” it urged.

Others pointed to tweets from the creators and users of automated systems or bots and voiced their frustration that consoles did not appear to be going to normal customers but to those who would be able to sell them for often twice their retail price or more.

One such account bragged that it had bought 2,000 of the consoles in a Game restock on Tuesday. That account – “Carnagebot” – locked its account after receiving backlash over the posts.

Sony has given little guidance on when new consoles might be arriving, and at what stage it expects that they will readily available to anyone who wants to buy one.

Last year, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said that the main driver of the issues was the higher-than-expected demand, and that while the Covid-19 outbreak had caused some problems with supply that would not have amounted to “very many”.

“Everything is sold. Absolutely everything is sold,” Mr Ryan told Russian news agency TASS in November.

Since then, Sony has stressed that it is working to fix the problems with supply but new restocks still arrive rarely, without much announcement and with stock selling out almost as soon as it appears.