The United Kingdom is essentially a battleground between the retailers that offer the next-gen consoles for sale and the scalpers who want to get a ton of money by reselling them.

GAME, one of the retailers in the United Kingdom, got new PlayStation 5 stocks the other day, offering some deals on them, including bundles with two games. The customers have quickly rushed to the website, which led to a queue that made the unfortunate wait for as long as a whole hour, but behind the scenes, all the PlayStation 5s have been sold in ten minutes.

Then, reports started popping up on social media, claiming that it happened due to a bot software called Carnage, which surfaced in September and has been used for footwear and Disney merchandise until now when it was utilized to gain the PlayStation 5 stocks to resell them for a big profit margin. The bot’s Twitter account claims that over two thousand PlayStation 5 checkouts happened at GAME, making their situation easier every time. The users criticized it, leading to the account going private.

Here’s GAME’s response: „PlayStation 5’s continue to be in very high demand and that demand far outweighs the current supply. We have strong measures in place to help ensure that our ‘1 per customer’ statement is maintained to allow for as many individual customers to successfully purchase as possible.

All pre-orders are subject to automatic checks and order updates such as cancellations following these checks take place after a customer will have received a valid order confirmation email. At present, these orders are still pre-orders and as such, no payments have yet been taken from customers. Payments will commence once our order checks have been completed,” GAME said.

It’s a reasonable move. Other retailers should do the same, as it’s not the best idea when you have people who’d want to buy a console, but only get it via some rich resellers who charge them twice the original price or even more. Don’t fall for them.

Source: PSU