A few seconds before noon on Monday, Jake Randall began encouraging people watching his livestream on YouTube to start refreshing Walmart’s website on their computers.
At his bidding, thousands of people around the country began furiously pounding keys, jostling to get to the front of the retailer’s virtual line for this holiday season’s hottest gift: a video game console. To increase their odds, Mr. Randall recommended that the 8,000 viewers on his livestream also get in line through Walmart’s app on their phones. As the minutes ticked by, a lucky few sent Mr. Randall screenshots of their purchases. Some sent him donations — about $2,000 in total — as thanks for his help. Others were unsuccessful. In an hour, all of the consoles were sold out.
Long lines outside retail stores devolving into brawls, desperate shoppers refreshing websites in a bid to outrace the bots and a cottage industry of people like Mr. Randall trading tips and making money in the process — that’s the state of the video game console market a year after a new generation of widely coveted devices were released during the height of the pandemic. The Xbox Series X from Microsoft, with a list price of $499, and the PlayStation 5 from Sony, $399, arrived as the popularity of gaming was skyrocketing with people stuck indoors, and they have been in high demand and short supply ever since.
Now, with the holiday shopping season in full swing, those same consoles remain the must-have gift on many wish lists. The result is fierce competition, both from other gamers and from people who snag as many devices as they can — sometimes using so-called purchase bots to snatch them faster than a human could — and then resell them for two or even three times the purchase price on websites like eBay or Facebook Marketplace.
“I grew up playing video games. Everyone wants to be the video game hero,” said Matt Swider, who quit his journalism job last month and now sits in his apartment in New York City, furiously scanning websites to send out alerts on Twitter to his followers whenever retailers have consoles for sale. “The villains in this story are the resellers employing bots both in person and online.”
Buying a game console this season is proving especially tricky this year. Taking a page from Amazon, retailers like Best Buy, Walmart and GameStop, are, in many cases, making the consoles available first to those who pay to be part of their membership programs. Even so, paying about $200 a year to Best Buy for a subscription isn’t a guarantee that shoppers will get the console. So on top of that, customers are following people on YouTube, Twitter, Twitch and Discord for hints and updates on what stores may have the items in stock or when a console may suddenly become available on a website for purchase. Then, it becomes a race to beat the bots.
For months, Victoria Garza, a 23-year-old medical student in Harlingen, Texas, has been working feverishly to search for her prize: a limited-edition Halo-themed Xbox. She follows channels on Discord and accounts on Twitter that alert her when the console is in stock. She has given her parents her credit card information, so that they can buy an Xbox for her if she is at work when the console becomes available.
Although it is normal for consoles to be elusive when they are first released, the scarcities seen in the past year are anything but. The problems stem from the well-chronicled global supply chain problems caused by the pandemic, which have made the computer chips many devices require hard to come by.
