A PS5 devkit is not designed to heat slices of pizza. Judging by its strange shape, however, someone clearly thought it would be funnier to sell it as a kitchen gadget than as development hardware.
Getting hold of a development kit for any console is not easy. Every first-party manufacturer tightly controls how many of these units are produced, where they go, and above all, who is allowed to have them, which makes them practically inaccessible to the average consumer. If someone does offer you one, it certainly will not be cheap. So when someone on eBay listed a PS5 devkit for sale and pocketed more than €10,000, it naturally caught the attention of both Sony and potential buyers.
The strangest part was not simply that someone was trying to sell an item that cannot legally be exchanged for money so casually, risking the loss of their eBay account in the process. The seller also jokingly tried to pass the development kit off as a pizza warmer. The PS5 devkit was not made to keep frozen or leftover pizza hot, but its unusual V-shaped design does make it look, at first glance, like some bizarre gamer kitchen appliance.
Someone sold a PS5 Dev kit as an "PlayStation Pizza kit" and it worked.. it was sold for 6K
High likely to avoid being delisted from Sony from selling his development kit pic.twitter.com/UZMatNEvoC
— consolevariations (@consolevariant) July 4, 2024
The Phenomenon Of Selling PS5 Devkits Like Pizza Warmers
In July 2024, an eBay user operating under the pseudonym bayercollars listed an 825GB PS5 development kit, model DFI-D1000AA, for sale. What made the listing curious was not only that it was being offered for money, but also how it was presented: the image and title chosen for the offer made it look like a Sony appliance with PlayStation branding, designed to reheat pizzas. That particular treat is hardly foreign to any self-respecting gamer, often sitting comfortably between long gaming sessions. The listing clearly attracted several buyers, as it ultimately sold for €10,343.54.
It was not an isolated case either. In fact, it seemed to be turning into something of a trend, as shown by the official X account of Console Variations. The account highlighted another auction, also on eBay, that was practically identical to the bayercollars listing, though with a few added touches: a well-known brand of pre-cooked pizza appeared in the background, along with a spatula bearing the PlayStation logo. That auction also closed successfully, with a final sale price of €6,000, which leads to an interesting theory about where these devkits may actually have come from.
The Justified Danger Of Selling Something Like This
Selling console development kits is strictly prohibited without authorization from Sony, or from any other first-party company that provided such a unit to an employee or external developer. Development kits are preliminary versions of consoles that do not necessarily match the final design, though their hardware is usually quite close to the retail machine. As a result, some users could potentially use them to develop pirated games or software not officially licensed by Sony. Even so, bayercollars and at least one other known user carried out these transactions, putting themselves in serious danger of having their accounts suspended for selling a devkit.
However, at least in the case of bayercollars, the fact that his account was still active almost a year later suggests that neither Sony nor eBay took legal action against him. That leads to the conclusion that neither he nor the other user were the ones who stole those devkits, and most likely, they did not even know exactly what they had. The most logical hypothesis is that someone else stole them, presumably an employee or a development group with ties to Sony, and then offered them to eBay users as novelty items to sell without warning them of the risks or explaining what the devices actually were.
To this day, it is unknown whether Sony managed to trace the origin of those devkits or whether it took legal action against the alleged thieves. What is clear, however, is that selling a PS5 development kit as a pizza warmer is an absurd, risky, and revealing story about the strange ways in which hardware that should remain inside tightly controlled development environments can leak into the wider world.
Source: GamePro
