I'm in a bit of a moral dilemma, guys. I've been checking out eBay listings for PS5s and I've seen some pretty "good" deals, at least by scalper standards. The other day, I saw a PS5 bundle with an extra controller + Rachet & Clank, Destruction All-Stars and Sackboy go for $870 and I've seen individual consoles sell in the $750 range. That's "only" $142 and $250 above MSRP, respectively, not too bad considering there's asshole scalpers selling them for double or even triple their MSRP and people buying them up at these absolutely insane prices, but I've been pondering: at the end of the day, is it really worth it? Not only forking over hundreds of extra dollars, but contributing to and rewarding the scumbags for hoarding them off with bots?
It's not that I can't afford it, and believe me, I don't WANT to pay these assholes and essentially get f*cked out of a few hundred dollars in the process, especially with the reports of UPS/Fed-Ex drivers stealing PS5s, so spare me the "DoN'T bUy FrOm ScAlPeRz!!!!" pitchforks. Believe me, I'm right there with you saying f*ck these clowns, but with the PS5 and XSX/S chip shortages and all next-gen stock drops being online only, it doesn't look like I'll be getting one at MSRP anytime soon if I were to play the waiting game unlike the Switch, which I was able to get in store a few months after launch with all the scalpers hoarding/marking up all the online stock. The chip shortages are primed to last into 2022 and I definitely don't see this going away before that, no, scratch that, I guar-damn-tee you it won't, which brings me to the crux of the problem:
to me, it's just not worth constantly refreshing the online retailer pages (Best Buy, Target, Amazon, Wal-Mart, etc.) for hours on end, hoping I'll get "lucky" enough to come across a live drop that'll sell out in minutes or before I can even add one to my cart, and I've been scouting the stock drop alert pages, too, not that they were much help to begin with since they only report "expected" drops and usually not even with specific times and/or dates. The way things are going, it's either I pay up or wait it out another year or more. I don't want to be "part of the problem", but I don't want to test my patience, either, it's already been stretched far enough as it is at this point (I've been told "don't pay scalpers, just wait a few months when they'll be readily available", well, we're now 8 months out, and here we STILL are, just as I suspected from the get-go).