I planned to get up early yesterday and pre-order a couple of items from Sony's 30th anniversa🐻ry collection, which includes stylized accessories, consoles, and a bunch of other devices inspired by the look of the original 1994 PlayStation. You can probably already tell where this is headed.
All of🍨 them look gorgeous, but ꩵstock was limited whether you wanted a PS5 Pro or a Portal, so part of me had given up hope before ever opening up my web browser. But if I kept a close eye on the PlayStation Direct website throughout the 26th, I’d be in with a slim chance of bagging everything I wanted. Then Sony opened the pre-orders minutes after midnight when everyone else in the UK was sound asleep. Myself included...
When I awoke, there was alreꦉady a massive queue to get onto the website and every single limited edition console and standard controller was sold out. I wasn’t going to spend several hundred pounds on a Portal I didn’t need, so I ordered a DualSense Edge and tried not to be too hard on myself. Besides, it wasn’t my fault that Sony had royally screwed things up.
At the time of writing, both l🅺imited edition PlayStation Portals and standard ⭕PS5 Pro consoles are still available for pre-order, but everything else has been sucked dry.
I waited in the queue anyဣway, mostly curious to see how many hours it would take and whether the stock had been annihilated by scalpers already🍸. Judging by eBay listings which are now flogging the limited edition PS5 Pro for several thousand pounds, that’s exactly what happened. Good, honest people who wanted to get their hands on something have once again been beaten to the punch by jerks who abuse the market and take advantage of those willing to pay inflated prices.
Sony could have avoided this by offering a greater amount of stock instead of relying heavily on artificial scarcity to drum up interest, or offering a queue system that actually prioritized any form of fairness. Only 12,300 limited edition PS5 Pro consoles were produced, which is roughly 0.01 percent of every PS5 that will ever be sold. Even if you increased that number to 123,000, that would only be 0.1 percent, but it would increase the chances of actually securing one by a substantial amount. It would still be incredibly rare, but now the privilege of oꦉwning a piece of PlayStation history belongs to a handful of rotten scalpers.
K🦂udos to for breaking down all that confusing math. Numbers are my mort𝓰al enemy.
There was also a stigma against people who were suddenly trying to pre-order the PS5 Pro when days earlier they were dunking on its price point and the fact it shouldn’t exist. My dear friends, yo𒁃u underestimate the gullible nature of collectors, and how a lush decal or promise of limited edition scarcity can change someone’s tune in an instant. It convinced me to try my hand at getting one, but like thousands of others, I was screwed over by scalpers.
PlayStation didn’t🧔 help itself with a mediocre queue system and an internal site that asked us to jump through countless hoops to sign in, add things to your cart, and actually process a transaction. I had an extra helping of anxiety after finally securing one of the limited edition products, only to realise it wouldn’t even add to my cart unless I signed in. Why not have us do that before entering the queue, oꦉr secure items in our cart first and then ask us to sort all the additional steps? It’s weirdly archaic for a console giant like this, and only further dissolves trust in how it will handle product drops like this in the future.

PS5 Pro 30th Anniversary Bundle
The headliner in PlayStation's 30th anniversary collection, the PS5 Pro bundle is the upgraded version of PlayStation's newest console with a PS1 makeover. The bundle includes the console, a matching DualSense Edge, a charging station, and a grey cover for your disc drive if you have one.