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It has been a whole year since PS5 pre-orders went live with very little warning and sent all of us into a panic.
The first anniversary of PlayStation and Xbox's newest consoles is fast approaching. In fact, it has now been a full year since the PlayStation Showcase giving us a closer look at some of the PS5's games, and also finally confirming a piece of information potential customers had been waiting months to hear. How much the console was going to cost.
The Showcase closed with PlayStation revealing a regular PS5 will retail for $499, while the digital edition would cost $100 less. There was no mention of when people would be able to pre-order the console. That made sense as it had been promised earlier that year that PlayStation would give customers plenty of warning in that regard.
Cue Geoff Keigley dropping a bombshell moments later. That pre-orders would go live the following morning. What started as a panic then became all-out online chaos as Walmart decided it didn't want to wait the handful of hours until the next day and set its pre-orders live early. That forced the hands of other major retailers like GameStop and Best Buy, resulting in virtual queues thousands of people long impatiently waiting for a console they were probably never going to get.
In fact, there's a very real chance some of you waiting in virtual queues that night one year ago still don't have a PS5 today. Even though Sony has sold more than ten million of them at this point, Toshiba recently highlighted that ongoing semiconductor shortages probably mean the console won't be readily available until 2023. Not to mention the uptick in demand that's about to hit as we enter the holiday season.
Chaos almost always ensues when a new console launches. Shortly after the PS5 launched, two months after the pre-order debacle, the BBC shared archive footage of people physically fighting over PS2s in the UK 20 years prior. Something felt and continues to feel different about the PS5, though. Perhaps because to begin with, stores were closed and the console could only be bought online. There's something that much more demoralizing about getting to the end of a virtual queue and finding nothing, especially after a year of doing it over and over again.