PS5 And Xbox Series X Scalpers Are Charging A Big Premium

After a busy week of launches, the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S have so far been difficult to come by, with new stock being bought up almost as soon as it drops. Some have blamed the stock shortages on bots buying up consoles for scalpers, and while we can't know how many of the purchases were made by bots, there sure are a lot of next-gen consoles being listed for high prices on Ebay.

While it was inevitable that the consoles would end up on Ebay with inflated prices, it looks like the re-sellers are doing a decent trade, too. A look through the PS5 listings that have sold in the day shows the consoles going for between $850 and $1200 in most cases. The console's recommended retail price is $500 for the disk edition or $400 for the digital-only console.

One of the highest-earning recent listings we found was a digital-only PS5 with its price pushed up to $1645, thanks to 34 bids made through Ebay's auction system. Another more lucky customer found the PS5 digital version for "just" $850.

Listings seem to have gone for up to a staggering amount of $14,493, which one Ebay user paid for a preorder of the PlayStation 5 digital edition back in September--before the console had actually released. Some listings are still offering to pawn off their pre-orders, without actually having a console in hand to sell.

The Xbox Series X and S have seen slightly more reasonable prices on resale. Sold listings show people buying new Xboxes for around $800 for the Series X, or closer to $450 for the Series S, with the official pricing sitting at $500 for the X and $300 for the S, the cheapest of the new-gen consoles.

While Ebay's unsold listings show people still asking up to $10,000 for the new consoles, the sold listings show most people aren't willing to pay too much more than $1000 for the resold consoles. The fact that people are paying scalpers' inflated prices shows how much demand there is for the next-gen consoles.

It appears Amazon isn't currently allowing third-party sellers to list PS5s for sale, likely to cut down on the kind of price-gouging that's taking place on Ebay. If you want to try your hand at getting a next-gen console without paying an inflated price for it, check out our PS5 buying guide or Xbox Series X and S guide.

If you're trying to decide which next-gen console to buy, here are our reviews of the three new options:

• Xbox Series S review
• Xbox Series X review
• PlayStation 5 review