WTF ?! The scalpers and robots I use have been a scourge to all gamers hoping to get a new PS5 / Xbox Series X / PC hardware this season. But some retailers have managed to fight the practice, including Walmart, which claims to have blocked tens of millions of robots trying to grab the PlayStation 5.
Jerry Geisler, chief information officer of Walmart Global Tech, writes that one of the preventative actions the company implemented a few hours before the PlayStation 5 event on November 25 blocked more than 20 million bot attempts in the first 30 minutes.
Geisler also notes that any audit is then faced, confirming that all orders were purchased by robots canceled by the company. “As a result, the vast majority of our state-of-the-art consoles have been purchased by legitimate customers, which is exactly what we want,” the post reads.
There is also a recommendation that MPs do more to prevent robots from retailing sites. In the UK, 26 politicians have signed a motion that could eventually lead to a ban on the resale of items purchased using automated robots.
To highlight how bad scalping has been this season, Bloomberg finds that the usual ratio of new consoles sold to games purchased for that device is one to one. In Japan, where Sony sold around 213,000 PlayStation 5 consoles, the top three titles sold less than 63,000 units, not counting digital downloads. There are three consoles for each game, illustrating how many people bought PS5s for the sole purpose of reselling them.
Despite Walmart’s apparent success, getting a PS5 remains an almost impossible task, although the company says it will have several state-of-the-art consoles that will soon go online.
Earlier this month, a scalper company that provided nearly 3,500 PS5 units to its members said it had “no regrets.” I’ve also heard that scalpers have made a profit of nearly $ 40 million from top holiday products.