After previously telling investors that the current PS5 restock situation likely wouldn’t improve until 2022, Sony is now muddying the waters by claiming that it hopes to ease the current PS5 stock shortage in the second half of 2021.
Head of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Jim Ryan, told Wired: “We’re working as hard as we can to ameliorate that situation. We see production ramping up over the summer and certainly into the second half of the year, and we would hope to see some sort of return to normality in terms of the balance between supply and demand during that period.”
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This obviously flies in the face of comments that Sony’s chief financial officer, Hiroki Totoki, made in a company briefing last month. He said, “I don’t think demand is calming down this year and even if we secure a lot more devices and produce many more units of the PlayStation 5 next year, our supply wouldn’t be able to catch up with demand.”
Of course, Ryan’s latest comments were made to a national media outlet so this is perhaps a sign that PlayStation wants to be more optimistic at least publicly. Behind (mostly) closed doors the company perhaps isn’t quite so bullish about its ability to meet the overwhelming demand for the system that seemingly refuses to die down.
If you were curious, the PS5 is suffering stock issues for the same reason that basically all sought-after tech products are experiencing shortages: the ongoing global chip crisis. This lack of vital components is affecting the production of not just gaming consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X but also electric cars and even medical equipment.
Sony has previously talked about potentially altering the PS5’s design in order to circumvent this issue, and it’s expected that production on a revised PS5 hardware model will begin in 2022. Of course, if Ryan’s comments do come true and Sony is able to achieve some return to normality drastic steps like hardware revisions may not be necessary - though we wouldn’t say no to a PS5 Pro regardless.
Regardless it’s hard to imagine a point this year in which you could just walk into a store and pick a PS5 off the shelf without issue. We’d expect that the PS5 restock disaster is going to stick around for a little while longer at least, especially as we move closer to the holidays when demand is expected to increase further.
If you’re still trying to secure a PS5 yourself then you need to be proactive, we’ve got a rundown of the essential PS5 restock tips you need to know. Plus, make sure to bookmark our PS5 restock guide, we update it daily with the latest stock information as we get it. It will help make the thankless task of actually buying a PS5 a little less daunting.
