The 2020 Console shortage

It's all gone

We sit in a brand new age of shiny game consoles which have been promised to be more powerful than any box we've put in our living rooms before, easily outstripping anything that's predated in terms of raw power. Thus that just means that games companies have found a new excuse, this time in ray-tracing, to cap gameplay at 30 FPS when 60 should be basic industry standard at this point. But excuse that over-priced sales point for a moment, because the Xbox Series X (Can't believe the smoothbrains in marketing settled on that) and the PS5 (Can't believe the designers settled on that) can't even make it to the shelves of regular consumers this side of Christmas, thanks to a seemingly unsurmountable storage problem that has attacked everyone, no matter your petty console allegiance. Well, almost everyone. I'm far out of the range for any of this super powerful paperweights so I can pretty much wait until a year or so down the line, but for those that expected to get their box in to be the highlight of the holiday season on this, absolute dick of a year, sorry guys; you're fresh outta luck.

We see shortages with every generation, it's just the way things work around here. Manufacturers seem to go out of their way to "misread" the market for their consoles so that they can act all surprised and brag about how popular they are when their stock runs dry; meanwhile the public finds themselves left potless. Perhaps the most notable recent example was, in fact, the time of the Nintendo Switch launch where stock was running out literally seconds after being booked. I still have no idea how I managed to secure mine in the middle of all that chaos! But even then there seems to be something special about the Xbox and Sony situation that we're in now. These aren't just normal shortages and setbacks, this is a gridlock situation where there's a total wasteland of availability that's driving holiday shoppers to the absolute extremes of their patience. One can but wonder about what could have caused this, as weekly stock updates blink out of existence before people's eyes and the desperation starts to sink it's icy grip into our backs during this winter blitz. Lets speculate.

First is the most innocent example which proposes something of an extreme benefit of the doubt towards the multibillionaire companies who run this season. Perhaps these people just misinterpreted the growth of the market and didn't account for the increased amount of folk who were ready and willing to buy a new console out of the gate, thus under manufactured. Now, this is assuming that these folk who's literal jobs rely on understanding the way the market is heading have no idea about the correlation between consumer growth and demand (which would be a ridiculous thing to overlook) but we've seen companies in similar positions who forget how to tie their own freaking shoe laces so I guess this could remain a distinct possibility. But then, would this really fall into a category of 'Company is so big that they fell out of touch with the consumers'? Because this seems like basic inventory management meltdowns. I'd call this an unlikely excuse. Sure, Nintendo did just this; but they really are so out of touch to the point of genuine self-sabotage, the others are supposed to have firmer heads.

Secondly I bring together a theory that I think may hold some more weight, even if it's just blaming the go-to patsy of this god forsaken year. Coronavirus. Maybe the Coronavirus got the consoles. Wait, let me explain- We know that these machines aren't produced too long in advance to sale, probable more to secure intellectual property secrets than to wiggle in more development room; so given that, it's probably true that the workforce who would be making these consoles, wherever in the world these guys could secure inexpensive labour, is suffering from reduced turnout. (And you can't really manufacture from home) If numbers can't be provided to make the things then it would explain why production can't just be ramped up on a dime to get over this hump, it's logistically impossible right now; which sucks because Covid is also the exact reason why so many are at home right now and need something to keep them distracted. Of course, one might say in response that the vast amount of the building work is done by machines these days, but I'm sure there's a human element in there somewhere. (Packaging?)

But thirdly we have the more insidious reasoning, the one doing the rounds and making headlines this time of year; that this was all incurred by the folly of scalpers. Now in case you are unfamiliar with the term, Scalpers are essentially the caste of scumbags that Nintendo try their hardest to exclusively cater for in everything they do. It's a term used to refer to those that swoop in and buy up the stock of a sought-after product so that they can control the market and force up prices to an insane, illegal profit margin. Or rather, it would be illegal if they had an actual merchant's licence. (I believe in this position it's just heavily frowned upon.) And as of late they have been the absolute scourge of people trying to make the most of this holiday season.

More so than with any other console release I can remember, scalpers have come together to absolutely throttle the console market by hawking online retailers with bots that swoop up thousands in an instant to be resold at a frankly ludicrous mark-up. In fact, there's even a specific group behind this scum-riddled tactic who's name I won't even mention because they don't deserve the recognition. (And I can't be bothered to look them up) These guys have delighted in talking about their process and taunting on social media, whilst spinning some nonsense about how they have no regrets, and simultaneously attempting to claim that their cause is sympathetic because they have families and thus that makes it entirely fair for them to try and blackmail other families in the middle of a global pandemic. As you can imagine, I have pretty much no sympathy for people who aren't just bottom feeding maggots, but who are so delusional that they can't even accept that. Talk about pathetic.

As we currently sit now, there are supposedly actually empty storehouses which the teams over at Playstation and Xbox can do nothing about in a reasonable time frame, and in a way they themselves are partially to blame. Both companies have drastically scaled back their own physical storefronts to a point where for this generation you absolutely have to buy from a third party retailer. This means that the responsibility for the order is being placed in the hands of people that have no incentive to watch out for scalpers or bot-orders because they get paid anyway, the backlash doesn't land on them. Some retailers don't even have to deliver the product with any level of professional pride, or at least that's the excuse I assume that Amazon is using to justify the absolute spate of stolen consoles that have been the fault of their drivers. (I guess that's what you get when you encourage distaste through anti-employee practises; a disobedient workforce) The next gen is, then, certainly in a pickle.

Of course, at the end of it all these are just the problems of today and when these consoles start becoming more reasonably priced they'll likely become far more available too. Scalpers genuinely do their best when keeping their stock shifting so I'm sure that games consoles will be released from their grasp in notime, but the fact we've reached this state to begin with certainly doesn't reflect well on Sony or Microsoft. As I stand, looking about my dying 7 year old console which is my only viable means of playing Cyberpunk 2077 (Barring a surprise CPU upgrade) I find these trials and tribulations of the new generation as an inevitable rite of passage that early adopters most endure. But that doesn't make it any more embarrassing that all these generations down the line the most simple problems haven't been resolved. (and in some cases, they've become worse) Fix your stock, guys. And the framerates. Fix that too.