The Sony PS5 has been very difficult to buy since its release in November 2020. According to Sony, the current shortage is expected to continue. The Chief Financial Officer at Sony, Hiroki Totoki said that even after attempting to increase the supply, the demand for PS5 is not decreasing and hence the shortage will likely continue for at least several more months.
The PlayStation 5 is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment which was announced in the year 2019 as the successor to the PlayStation 4. The platform was launched in two variants: a base model with an Ultra HD Blu-ray–compatible optical disc drive, and a Digital Edition lacking this drive, serving as a lower-cost model for those who prefer to buy games through digital download.
The PlayStation 5’s main hardware features include a solid-state drive that promises high speed streaming in turn boosting the overall performance, a 7 nanometer AMD chip capable of 4K resolution display at up to 120 frames per second, hardware-accelerated ray tracing for realistic lighting, and reflections and the Tempest Engine allowing for hardware-accelerated 3D audio effects. Other features include the DualSense controller with haptic feedback.
In a week of launch, Sony sold over 100,000 standard consoles and 14,181 Digital Editions in Japan. A combined total of 118,082 PS5s were sold in Japan during its launch week making it the best-selling console in the country for that week. Two weeks after launch, Sony declared the largest launch in PlayStation history, surpassing PS4’s 2.1 million units in its first two weeks in 2013. Sony has already sold nearly 8 million PS5 consoles worldwide. Also, Sony increased the supply production to 10 million units by the end of 2020.
The stock issues are mostly occurring because of the general shortage of semiconductors around the world due to the pandemic. The rumors say that Sony is planning to redesign the console to combat these component shortages. This redesign will be mostly internal and will supposedly feature a 6nm AMD processor instead of the current 7nm processor.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused massive disruptions in supply chains and logistics, coupled with over 13% increase in global demand for personal computers has badly damaged the global chip market, creating a worldwide chip shortage affecting most of the manufacturers in the field of electronics. The pandemic’s impact on the manufacture of semiconductors in South Korea and Taiwan was cited as a cause for the shortage, with constrained supply impacting industries as broad as console gaming and the automotive industry.
Microsoft is said to in a similar position. However, Microsoft has said that stock issues will continue only until the month of June. Even Nintendo might not be able to build enough Switch consoles to go around.
This means that people who were thinking of buying Ps5 for Christmas might have to order it much in advance or completely forget about it. Even though the company is repeatedly increasing the supply, the global chip shortage will affect it one day. The idea of a redesign might be a way out, but currently, it is just a rumor and no one knows for sure if Sony is really going for it to not.
