Last week, I was watching eBay, trying to decide if I should sell my PS5. I wouldn’t dream of becoming a exploiter, but it is hard to ignore how much it is worth. My daughter and I were hit Astro Bot And the Miles MoralesSo I thought I’d take a peek at the resale market. Wow, do they deserve so much!
It just isn’t PlayStation 5 – I found it Xbox Series X and S., Nvidia RTX 3090And the 3080And the 3070And and 3060 t Graphics cards and AMD competitors RX 6800 And the 6800 XT All GPUs charge incredibly high prices in the resale market. It no longer surprises me how every major holiday ticket game gadget sells instantly anytime they restock; The incentive of speculators is very high. They are so loud that even people like me, who have bought one that you intend to use, may have to think twice. (This is capitalism for you.)
Example: A full-fat PlayStation 5 with a hard drive retails for $ 499.99. But it deserves easily Double This is on eBay: I am The average actual final selling price of the PS5’s 100, minus some outliers, to arrive at the street price $ 1,024. Bear in mind, this is not the asking price: this is what people actually pay for these devices.
I ran the same numbers for the PS5 digital edition, the new Xbox consoles and all six graphics cards. Here are the results:
PS5, Xbox, and GPU pricing: 2020 holiday
| item | retail price | Street price |
|---|---|---|
| item | retail price | Street price |
| PS5 (tablet) | $ 499 | $ 1,024 |
| PS5 (digital) | $ 399 | $ 990 |
| Xbox X Series | $ 499 | $ 835 |
| Xbox S | $ 299 | $ 471 |
| NVIDIA RTX 3090 | $ 1499 | $ 2076 |
| NVIDIA RTX 3080 | $ 699 | $ 1,227 |
| NVIDIA RTX 3070 | $ 499 | $ 819 |
| NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti | $ 399 | $ 675 |
| AMD RX 6800 XT | $ 649 | $ 1232 |
| AMD RX 6800 | $ 579 | $ 841 |
I didn’t throw out any open box or consoles used to reach those numbers, and you can easily see just how strong the order of the PS5 in particular: Even the PS5 Digital Edition (without the drive) is nearly worth nearly the retail version of the disc for an additional $ 100 .
While researching, I also saw that including additional games, consoles, or accessories isn’t necessary: Sometimes that was enough to justify an extra $ 100 or $ 200, but the PS5 didn’t need one to raise $ 1K or more. (Some Xbox consoles with additional accessories seem to be worth $ 50 to $ 100 more than others, but people clearly buy the consoles themselves.) All this means unless the situation changes drastically, speculation will not stop anytime soon.
If there’s a bright spot for potential console buyers, it’s not all the PS5 and Xbox listed on eBay actually selling, even if it’s just a few of them. In terms of volume, the PS5 and the new Xbox each moved about 1,000 units on eBay on December 3 alone, but some PS5 listings and $ 850 on the Xbox Series X ran out around the clock without selling them. (Most digital versions of the PS5 and Xbox Series S seem to sell, but there have also been far fewer of them listed than the disc-based models.)
On the PC side, new Nvidia and AMD graphics cards appear to be squeezed into renders according to eBay listings. Almost every card I’ve seen has found a buyer, and saved the more expensive RTX 3090s – and even there, there were as few as $ 2,400 and $ 2,500 in sales.
Photography by Tom Warren / The Verge
The shortfall looks very real: perhaps a hundred RTX 3080 cards were changed on December 3rd, even fewer RTX 3070 cards, and only 27 new AMD cards arrived at eBay buyers that day.
As we discussed again and again in the edgeIt is virtually impossible to purchase all of these items from a physical store at their retail price at this time. Unless you’re lucky, have connections, or want to pay for robots or speculators, you may not be able to find one at all – and Retailers don’t have the right incentives to fix that.
We like to think we have some fast and smart bargain hunters among the staff, but many of us do Still struggling To find a new GPU, PS5, or Xbox. Every supposed buying opportunity is another trash offer. Often “soon” is immediately followed by “Out of stock” and if we can actually get one into our digital cart in a jiffy it will often disappear before payment. The launch of the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti on December 2nd was no exception. With retailers failing to launch on time and others gone before they actually appeared in stock.
Best Buy was a special treat:
It’s also fun to see GameStop and Newegg “restock” these products – where “restock” means. We sell on bundles with unwanted additives. Can you blame them, however, when eBay shows that even these buyers can get their money’s worth based on current supply and demand?
This style has been implemented many times before, and it will likely catch up with the show eventually. Usually, these companies don’t intentionally create scarcity, even if it felt like it in early 2008 when they camped out in a frozen Nintendo Wii car park for an entire year. distance Console launched.
But we live in unprecedented times right now, with companies like Microsoft and Nvidia indicating that it could be months before things are over. I can’t remember the holiday season with these many must-have items, either: Tickle ElmoPower Rangers early, and that the Nintendo Wii was a one-off habit!
I still tend to sell my PS5 on eBay; I just love the idea of trading it against the AMD RX 6800, as you suggested In my review, But it’s not the easiest to find that GPU; It looks like I’ll need most of the winnings I’ll see from selling the console to buy the card on eBay as well.
