That of 2022 is the third Christmas for the PlayStation 5 and will most likely be the third consecutive Christmas of difficulty for those who want to buy one, especially in the West.
There are no official confirmations, but you can read between the lines listening to the words of Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, who spoke at this year’s PlayStation Partner Awards event, apologized to customers and thanked them for their patience and said the PS5’s sourcing and manufacturing issues would be resolved. Only for the Asian market and only from 2023, though. Translated: on this side of the world, and certainly at least throughout the Christmas period, getting your hands on the latest PlayStation will be anything but easy.
How to (try to) buy a PS5
It must be said that the difficulties, linked mainly (but not only) to the so-called chip crisis, are not only Sony’s: Microsoft also has similar problems for its Xbox, so much so that last Christmas we struggled a lot to buy one. And yet, while the American company seems to have managed to better balance supply and demand, Sony’s problems remain, probably also due to a higher demand. And despite the slight price increase decided last summer.
Precisely for the PS5, Amazon has also debuted sales by reservation in Italy, which should hinder speculators and guarantee more people the possibility of buying products without surcharges: when the product becomes available again, a purchase request is made and possibly you receive an email with an invitation to complete it within 72 hours.
Although Amazon has obviously specified that “not all requests will be accepted”, this is undoubtedly the safest way to try to buy a PS5. Not easy, but definitely the one most likely to succeed. Definitely more than going to the Sony site, where the Buy PlayStation 5 button hasn’t been active for months, or from the shops. Where the console isn’t even there.
How will Sony fix the problems
That of points of sale in the physical world is another important issue for the Japanese company, so much so that in Ryan’s words there are also those who wanted to read the possibility of a return of consoles to the shelves and in general of a return to normal . Which at the beginning will concern only the Asian market, but will probably also extend to the rest of the world.
But how would Sony fix the shot? Here too, there are no official answers: the most probable hypothesis is that the credit goes to the so-called PS5 Slim, the new PlayStation 5 model which would not only be more compact but also made differently, with an easier processor to be produced, smaller heatsinks and extractable disk reader. And that would be arriving in 2023.