A Journalist, a Philosophy Major and the Mad Scramble for Video Game Consoles
The New York Times
New gaming consoles remain in short supply this holiday season, spawning cottage industries of tipsters and scalpers making money off their scarcity.
A few seconds before noon on Monday, Jake Randall began encouraging people watching his livestream on YouTube to start refreshing Walmart’s website on their computers.
At his bidding, thousands of people around the country began furiously pounding keys, jostling to get to the front of the retailer’s virtual line for this holiday season’s hottest gift: a video game console. To increase their odds, Mr. Randall recommended that the 8,000 viewers on his livestream also get in line through Walmart’s app on their phones. As the minutes ticked by, a lucky few sent Mr. Randall screenshots of their purchases. Some sent him donations — about $2,000 in total — as thanks for his help. Others were unsuccessful. In an hour, all of the consoles were sold out.
Long lines outside retail stores devolving into brawls, desperate shoppers refreshing websites in a bid to outrace the bots and a cottage industry of people like Mr. Randall trading tips and making money in the process — that’s the state of the video game console market a year after a new generation of widely coveted devices were released during the height of the pandemic. The Xbox Series X from Microsoft, with a list price of $499, and the PlayStation 5 from Sony, $399, arrived as the popularity of gaming was skyrocketing with people stuck indoors, and they have been in high demand and short supply ever since.
Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s antitrust regulator, who put technology’s harms on the global agenda, reflected on a decade of taking on the biggest companies and what comes next.