The PlayStation 5 is almost easy to buy

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Throughout the pandemic, it has brought me extreme joy to pen articles celebrating that hard-to-find tech is getting easier to buy at retail cost. First, it was the Xbox Series S and Nintendo Switch OLED, then the Series X, and almost all Nvidia and AMD GPUs followed a few months after. We’re getting very close to being able to say that the PS5 will soon join the club.

Yesterday, we wrote that Sony had kicked off another one of its once infrequent (but becoming much more frequent) PS5 restocks, and the $549.99 console bundle that includes the PS5 with a disc drive along with Horizon Forbidden West is still in stock about 19 hours later. Even after everyone has had the chance to run through the queue and make a purchase, there’s still stock left over, chilling out. You can probably go take a nap right now, come back, and buy one later if you want.

That kind of luxury — buying a gadget when you want just because the thought came to you — is something that a lot of people (including a lot of us at The Verge) are relearning. And it’s great. Those early days when we had the mighty responsibility to tell readers when they had minutes — no, seconds — to score a console felt special, but I think we’re all ready to move on.

In February, Sony was still struggling to put PS5s on shelves (the PS4 had sold more in its lifespan at that post-launch mark). Recent sales data from the NPD Group states that the PlayStation 5, along with the Xbox Series X, had much higher year-over-year sales in July 2022 than in July 2021, suggesting that consoles have become much more readily available.

I don’t want to say definitively yet that the PS5 is “easy” to buy because, if that were the case, it’d be in stock and ready to ship immediately from the likes of Amazon, Best Buy, and more. You can currently request an invite to purchase one from Amazon, but that only half counts since you have to wait to see if you actually receive the invite. You can also fill out this form for a chance to be invited by Sony to buy a PS5.

With this PS5 restock lasting through the night and well beyond it at this point, I hope it’s an encouraging sign that stock won’t be as much of a dire issue for the 2022 holiday season as it was last year.