Buying bots are scooping up PS5s and Xboxes before you can
Fantastic piece from Luke Winkie on The Verge that deep dives into the bot/reseller world we’ve all been forced to reckon with lately.
More than a year on, it’s still hard to buy a new PlayStation or Xbox without some help. Flippers have become notorious for snatching up the fresh restocks offered online with the help of ultra-fast buying bots, forcing everyone else to buy units off the secondary market for egregious, 100-dollar markups. But after delving into the console reselling underworld, I was shocked to learn that resellers aren’t the primary problem. Instead, they’re merely the pawns of the true powerbrokers of the industry: the enterprising developers selling these bots to aspiring flippers in the first place.
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