Imagine this: you visit your big neighborhood store hoping to buy a PlayStation 5 and it’s just there. It’s on the shelf. You can pay for it, you can leave the store with it, and it is yours. You don’t have to sit at your desk all day refreshing browser tabs. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
On November 12, 2020, Sony released the PS5 in a handful of markets. The following week it was released worldwide. Four months later the time had come remains almost impossible to get your hands on one – a shortage you can link to a perfect storm of scalpers, production problems, and an unprecedented global pandemic. Worse, the situation is showing no sign of easing and may even last into the second half of summer.
“The biggest challenge here is the semiconductor shortage that affects virtually everything in the world from cars to computers and graphics cards to PS5s,” said Mat Piscatella, executive director and video game consultant at the NPD group, told me about a Zoom call recently. “It looks like it’s going to be a challenge for a while, probably in Q2 or Q3 or even later, depending on a number of factors.”
As the Harvard Business Review It was detailed last month that the shortage of semiconductors and chips is both due and not due to the pandemic. In the past year, two large production plants in Japan were essentially shut down during fires: one for the production of fiber optics (for the construction of computer parts) and one for the production of electronics. The automotive industry also played a role. When the pandemic first hit last spring and confined millions to the home, automakers cut orders for nearly all production parts, including chips that are essential to many modern automobiles. Then, as vehicle travel picked up again later in the year, the same companies increased orders for chips. And then there’s Donald Trump, who really messed things up Kickstart a badly advised trade war, regulate selling American-made semiconductors to China-based companies (forcing those companies to stockpile) and Director the federal government will blacklist China-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation.
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Additionally, as HBR points out, air freight has experienced significant restrictions in recent months due to a number of factors including the overriding need to ship Covid-19 vaccines and the general decline in passenger traffic (meaning, that companies cannot use these flights to ship inventory the grounding in February a Boeing fleet.
Wrap it all up in a global pandemic that has transformed the supply chain in too many ways to list. You can see the production of the most anticipated game console on the market come to a standstill.
The PlayStation 5 uses a chip developed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a California-based semiconductor manufacturer that makes graphics cards, processors, and the like. (AMD didn’t respond to a request for comment from Kotaku.) Earlier this year, AMD CEO Lisa Su told CNBC said the company expects chip manufacturing bottlenecks at least in the first half of the year. How reported This is what Su said on an AMD earnings call from January.
“Production lines can only deliver that many units per hour. A mapping of production lines that can build things like a new console is not infinite. So we’ve seen that in the past every successful new console has faced bottlenecks of one kind or another, usually in the first six months to a year. But this is only because the demand always significantly exceeds the production capacity. So we would still reach the limits of our capacity. Right now these chips add an additional capacity challenge, ”said Piscatella. He also noted that the number of new consoles currently being manufactured is not significantly different from previous generations of consoles. The main contrast is that you can usually point to some sort of increase in production at this point in the cycle. This time it is not. (Piscatella was unable to provide specific numbers due to data agreements between console manufacturers and NPD.)
But hey, it’s the turn of the White House. Last month, President Biden problematic an instruction to investigate the causes of this semiconductor deficiency. The abstract states that pending the results of the review, this order would essentially result in the US producing more semiconductors domestically. It remains to be seen whether this will mean anything at all. According to research Under the guidance of consulting firm McKinsey, it can take up to two years to establish a semiconductor factory and at least another year or more to actually ramp up production.
What does this mean for you and your potential PS5? That dream where you can just go to your local Best Buy – or Target or GameStop or Walmart or wherever – and buy an off-the-shelf PS5? When did that happen?
Sony did not say. A Sony representative said he would look into the matter if asked for a comment about when widespread, regular availability could occur for the PS5 – at least according to the company.
Piscatella is a little more optimistic: “If nothing else goes wrong, then hopefully we’ll see a little more inventory for people in August and September.”
Let’s say you’re seriously in the mood for an all-digital PS5 and, in the meantime, you’re lucky with a single-drive model. (This also applies to people who find themselves in an inverted situation.) Chances are, your best bet is to just reach for the first model you come across.
“I don’t know if people will be able to choose [between models]especially in the next six months, ”said Piscatella. “If you want one, all you have to do is grab the one that’s available to you because it won’t wear off anytime soon.”
In other words, the PS5, just like all of us, is in tune with the whims of 2020 Part II: 2021.
“Hopefully sometime this year they’ll be on a shelf somewhere and you can just pick one up,” Piscatella said. “But, you know, 2021. It’s chaos. Everything is uncertain. “
