PS5 Scalpers & the Bots People Hate
By: Alex Mell-Taylor
Tags: Online Shopping, PlayStation, Ps5, Sony, Bots

Online retailers may have taken some simple steps, such as limiting traffic from a single IP address. Still, such solutions have easy workarounds like IP Proxies that even novices can implement.

The developers behind the bot CandyPreme 2.0, for example, have a Beginner Guide that is very user friendly. When that fails, most scalpers belong to “cook groups,” which are online forums (e.g., typically discord or slack channels) that share the latest information and strategies.

Scalper groups may be annoying to the consumer, but, arguably, they are not detrimental to the original brands they resell. The scalpers we are referring to here are often tied to the acquisition of luxury goods, especially sneakers and tickets.

When you examine what most cook groups bought before Sony and Microsoft released the latest generation of consoles, they were overwhelmingly devoted to self-proclaimed “sneakerheads,” using bots to snag shoes such as Air Jordans. AIObot, for example, is specifically devoted to corning the market on rare sneakers and has a logo of a robot carrying a shoe.

Source: Twitter handle @ANB_AIO

These luxury brands ultimately benefit from scalpers because they are not trying to sell through quantity alone, but instead from the price markup that comes with prestige. Sneakerheads bring with them fervent demand, and Nike makes the object of their obsession a rarity by constricting supply.

Companies such as Nike could stop scalping by merely increasing the supply of their limited editions to make the markup less desirable, but in many ways, that’s beside the point. Fans are paying for the allure of scarcity (real or imagined), and they are using bots to do it. As Felix Salmon writes in Splinter:

“…Nike knows better than anybody that use of bots is a sign of fandom. Show me a fan who managed to get his hands on one of these sneakers at launch, directly from the website, and I’ll show you a fan who used a bot.…Nike could put the bots out of business tomorrow, if it wanted — and so when it attacks them with mere words, that’s a clear sign that the company is actually OK with their existence.”

The same can be said of next-generation consoles. The early adoption of consoles is a difficult process. They are notoriously released with many bugs and few exclusive titles, which, if current reporting is to be believed, remains true with the PS5 as well. Players are not obtaining a PS5 due to it being an optimal gaming experience — that’s months, if not years away — but for the prestige of having the thing before everyone else.

Even if retailers are not getting the profit from a scalper’s resale, they still benefit from increased anticipation and demand. When the market rate for a console online is $1000, you will think the retail rate of $399 for the digital (and $499 for the hard disk) is a steal by comparison.

The press generated over its perceived scarcity might have even piqued your interest in it in the first place. As one frustrated shopper, who was unable to secure one of two PS5’s at a California GameStop during Black Friday, told ABC News: “…there’s a huge craze, people are fighting and murdering each other, everyone’s going crazy. And then all of a sudden: Media! Press! Free advertising for this console.”

We could not find any occurrences of someone in the U.S. being killed over a PS5 sale, but the frustration in that statement, though maybe not the reality, is clearly felt by consumers. People are frustrated by the constraint in supply, and the majority of that hatred has fallen on scalpers. While men such as Tierno like to style themselves as slick entrepreneurs or even self-proclaimed Robin Hoods, the dominant narrative is that they are to blame.