Sony blasts off to Saturn, causes PS5 pre-order chaos

Sony has finally announced the price and release date for the PlayStation 5. We now know that the disc-based standard version will be launching on November 12th in North America at a price of $499 USD. A digital only version, sans the Bluray drive, will be $100 cheaper at $399. Yet, that’s not what PlayStation fans are talking about.

It seems Sony has decided to jump the gun a bit when it comes to pre-orders.

Back in July, the company’s marketing head Eric Lempel, speaking to Geoff Keighley, said that gamers would be given plenty of advance notice before they started taking orders. Sony had also announced a special reservation system that would limit them to fans with existing active PSN accounts, presumably to prevent scalpers from snatching them up.

Well… it appears they changed their mind. After doing their presser on Wednesday, the company announced that pre-orders would go live at select retailers now, you’re looking at now sir. When did that happen? Just then. We’re at now now.

The problem is the information wasn’t exactly relayed to customers all that well. It was posted in a Tweet, which if you didn’t happen to see, means you’re already SOL. And that would probably be the vast majority of people legitimately interested in picking up the system this Holiday.

Well, consoles are already up on eBay selling for ludicrous prices, which has a lot of fans hopping mad. Especially after the company was strongly indicating that they would be limiting orders precisely in order to prevent this. Most are now going for close to $1,000 on the auction site, a number which is likely to increase if it hasn’t already.

Now, if you’re an old fart like me, you might remember that Sega did something very similar with the Saturn launch in North America some 25 years earlier. The console was announced for sale immediately, at an E3 press conference very few people actually saw. Sega also did it through “select retailers”, which angered a lot of their other retail partners.

It looks like the first major misstep of this generation goes to Sony. So why did they do this? Well, I can only speculate, but I think Series X/S has them spooked. Microsoft is hungry to get back on top of the video game market, and has been very aggressive with their strategy this time around. I don’t think Sony was expecting a next gen system at $299, even if it is just a gussied up One X with a few extra bells and whistles. It will likely be a strong seller, especially when paired up with those Game Pass bundles.

Will this pre-order debacle hurt the prospects of the PlayStation 5? That’s tough to say. Sony has by far the largest install base right now, with a lot of people locked into that ecosystem. It’s definitely not as bad as what Microsoft did with the Xbox One’s bungled unveiling. So whether this hurts them really depends on what they do to mitigate the damage. We’ve seen these scalper runs in past generations, but breaking their promise to prevent that could erode goodwill among their fans. But then again these are the same gamers who buy Madden every year expecting things to be different, so we’ll see.