Anyone who wants to buy a PS5 must be very lucky or rely on technical tricks. Sony has now come up with a new idea on how to make life difficult for scalpers. However, it remains questionable how well this new ‘trick’ will work.
Anyone who wants to buy a PS5 is currently having little luck. Many consoles are not being sold at the moment, and the drops are rather small. The drop from Saturn was a disaster and the PS5 drop at Medimax was technically chaotic as well.
Many consoles continue to end up in the hands of greedy scalpers who want to profit from the resale. A seller had put the PS5 behind a paywall, which scalpers found quite appealing.
Now Sony seems to have a new idea on how to make life harder for these people, but it doesn’t seem very convincing.
A small sticker is supposed to make life difficult for scalpers
What is this trick? Anyone who buys a PS5 or other hardware from Sony’s direct shop will find their packages sealed with a special holographic sticker. As soon as this seal is broken, the buyer knows that the hardware has already been used. Other manufacturers also use such stickers, and especially with expensive hardware, these “security hologram VOID security films” are applied.
Sony has now started distributing a similar sticker to retailers in Japan (via gamerant.com). This sticker is then supposed to be applied to the PS5 packaging and broken at the point of sale. Future buyers are then to believe that the console has already been used.
Because the holographic stickers cannot be completely removed, and worst-case scenario, even the packaging tears. Therefore, no one can hide that the package has already been opened.
What is this supposed to achieve? The intention is to force scalpers to sell the unsealed consoles as used, which should reduce the prices for PS5 scalpers. This is because there are legal regulations on what can be sold as “new” and what can be sold as “used”.
In theory, this sounds good; in practice, it is unlikely to deter most scalpers from buying PS5 consoles and reselling them at high prices. There are also no reports so far that prices for PS5 consoles have really fallen. And anyone who really wants a console and doesn’t want to wait any longer will continue to pay greedy scalpers for it. And scalpers are supposed to be able to live well thanks to the PS5.
Tips for buying a PS5: If you haven’t got a PS5 yet and really want to buy one, check out our ticker. Here we keep you up to date daily and explain how you can best get a PS5 and show you drops for the coveted console. This way, you don’t have to support scalpers:
