It is still dark when the line starts forming outside an electronics store in Tokyo, as desperate gamers try to snag the latest PlayStation or Xbox despite chronic shortages in Japan.
The consoles made by Sony and Microsoft have been hard to buy since their November 2020 release, as has Nintendo’s Switch, with supply chain issues exacerbated by lockdowns in China.
Shortages have struck worldwide, but are particularly acute in Japan because Sony and Microsoft have prioritized other markets.
Photo: AFP
That has left consumers and stores in a game of cat-and-mouse as customers hunt coveted consoles and sellers battle chaos that has sometimes required police intervention.
Tetsuya, 50, has been trying to get a console since February and lined up before 6:30am with dozens of other people outside a store in the electronics district of Akihabara.
However, at about 8am, an employee emerged to announce the store had not received either PlayStation 5s (PS5s) or Xboxes, and the crowd quickly dispersed.
“It’s a shame, but I’ll keep trying my chances if I can,” said Tetsuya, who declined to give his second name.
Hoping to discourage crowding, many stores have moved sales online, using lottery systems, while others have shifted to low-profile sales that take place without prior warning, with consoles arriving on a random schedule.
The phenomenon is known as “guerrilla sales” in Japan, a term that first emerged with the Nintendo DS console, which was a victim of its own success during the 2000s
Some gamers are fighting back with their own tactics, including one who has set up a Web site gathering crowdsourced information.
“Last summer, I spent three months trying to buy a PlayStation 5, but every time I went to a store, they were sold out,” said the 40-year-old Japanese man, an artificial intelligence researcher who asked to remain anonymous.
“The only option was to phone each store or find information on Twitter,” he said. “I thought to myself that everyone must have the same problem, and that creating a site to share information would help the community.”
He said he spends hours on weekends sorting and verifying up to 500 messages posted daily on his site’s forum.
“For PS5s in Yokohama, they are now selling both the disc edition and the digital edition. It’s unclear how many units they have. There’s no line,” one post said.
The information gives gamers real-time leads, but is also fed into a calendar to highlight trends and analyzed by an algorithm designed to predict when stores are likely to have supplies.
Japan’s console drought is the result of various factors, Toyo Securities analyst Hideki Yasuda said.
Microsoft’s Xbox has never been as popular in Japan as elsewhere, so in times of short supply, the country is not a priority market.
Sony has also targeted PS5 sales in Europe and North America, said Yasuda, who estimates just 5 to 8 percent of the 20 million PS5s sold worldwide were in Japan.
When the PS4 launched in 2013, “the smartphone game market in Japan was exploding while the console market was stalling,” he said. “Sony must have thought it was going to disappear in the 2020s, especially with the shrinking Japanese population.”
As a result, a PS5 bought for ¥55,000 (US$405) can now easily fetch ¥80,000 to ¥100,000 when resold, and there have even been fistfights involving alleged resellers at stores.
Despite promises from PlayStation chief executive officer Jim Ryan in May of a “significant ramp up” in production, Yasuda does not expect a major boost to deliveries before the second half of next year.
The crowdsourcing site founder said he would keep going, determined to help those “who really love video games” against “scalpers.”
“I have no life on the weekend, but if I stop, people who want to buy a console will be stuck,” he said.
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