If any shoppers are hoping to find a secret cache of PlayStation 5s at some out-of-the-way electronics store, they’re out of luck.
As the frenzy around the new console continues, PlayStation’s higher-ups are being honest about the lack of supply. In a new interview with the Russian news agency TASS, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan said the first run has been completely wiped out.
“Everything is sold. Absolutely everything is sold,” Ryan is quoted as saying. “I’ve spent much of the last year trying to be sure that we can generate enough demand for the product. And now in terms of my executive bandwidth, I’m spending a lot more time on trying to increase supply to meet that demand.”
While retailers do have stores of the console to pull out during their upcoming Black Friday sales, Ryan told the agency it’s a scramble on Sony's end to keep up with the wants of the market. He said getting the consoles built during a global pandemic has been “challenging from the production side,” but that the actual number of consoles made was not far off from where they would have been otherwise.
“The way we took it to market might have been a bit different, but the actual product would have been the same,” he said. “We might have had a few more to sell, but not very many: the guys on the production/manufacturing side have worked miracles.”
Neither Ryan nor Sony have shared sales numbers over the first two weeks of the PS5 being in the world. The CEO seemed to have lost quite a bit of sleep over getting the PS5 to market, just so that it could sell out in the way that it did.
“I wouldn’t plan on doing another big console launch in the midst of a global pandemic,” he said. “And I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody else.”
