| Hey y'all, it's Austin. About seven months after the launch of Microsoft Corp.'s new Xbox and Sony Group Corp.'s rival PlayStation 5, the sold-out-everywhere products are still nearly impossible to buy. Unless you're willing to spend double or triple the cost, good luck getting your hands on either of the rival video-game consoles. One EBay seller, apparently as a parody of escalating scalper prices, is offering Microsoft's Series X version for $15,000—30 times the $500 retail price—along with a framed certificate verifying "that you bought one of the world's most expensive" Xbox devices. These battles between gaming-hardware makers are usually referred to as the "console wars." But with Covid-19 having crunched supply chains and the ongoing chip shortage especially hurting gaming products, which require higher-end graphics cards and computer processors, the Xbox-versus-PS5 contest has transformed into something more mundane. Microsoft and Sony are now racing to restock retail store shelves in order to get the consoles to shoppers at all. Since November, frustrated gamers have been facing off against scalpers and bots to purchase the tiny number of units that suddenly become available overnight at some online and in-person shops. Microsoft expected tight Xbox supplies through the end of 2020, and then at least until spring 2021, and then until at least until this month. Sony, too, has struggled to keep production up with demand, and recently warned that PS5 output would be constrained even into 2022. "It will get better every month throughout 2021," Sony's PlayStation head Jim Ryan told the Financial Times earlier this year. Still, he said, due to supply chain woes, "There are very few magic wands that can be waved." In that vacuum, consumers have become desperate for restocking clues. Blogs track the latest inventory updates, and there are myriad Twitter accounts devoted to restocking alerts and links to sellers who are suddenly no longer sold out of Xboxes and PlayStations, however briefly. When Matt Swider, U.S. editor of gadget-news site TechRadar.com, tweets out links to new units abruptly available at Walmart or Best Buy, they often sell out within minutes if not faster. "Was in checkout and about to put my payment info in but then it said it was out of stock," read one gamer tweet this month, along with a sad emoji. "All I know is pain." The same frustration is felt at brick-and-mortar stores too. GameStop Corp., perhaps trying to prove it's more than a meme stock, made headlines last week for being perhaps the only physical U.S. retailer offering the devices. Some of their stores even posted signs with the exact inventory count on-hand, though customers lined up early to ensure those were spoken for. When I visited my nearby GameStop late one afternoon I found a printed poster on the window warning "Out of Series X|S at this time," referring to the two new generations of Xboxes. A store clerk told me there was a long line down the sidewalk before their doors opened, with more people than they had consoles available, and that, based on what he heard people talking about, he estimated nine out of 10 customers there were scalpers only buying the devices to resell them. My expectations were already low. I'd failed to procure a new console during the pandemic, save for an old-school Nintendo Co. Wii. I have alerts set for Swider's and other tracker account tweets, searching for news of consoles supposedly available here and there at Costco or Amazon or AntOnline.com, to no avail. Only recently, I found myself refreshing BestBuy.com's in-store pickup option, for various nearby zip codes, based on tweeted reports that some were in stock in Southern California. (Yikes, I know.) The irony is that I'm not even gaming that much as pandemic safety restrictions ease. Yet my friends and I are in our own mini console war to determine the platform of our collective futures. Whoever manages to buy one first—whether a PS5 or Xbox—will likely determine what console the rest of us purchase, so we can all compete in multiplayer titles together down the road, given how few games these days allow for cross-platform play. Thus the PlayStation loyalists are vying for the first PS5, so the rest of us Xbox fanboys will have to follow suit. Prior to the pandemic, analysts would've likely predicted the console wars would be won by whichever company had the best hardware specs or big-name exclusive gaming titles. But for Microsoft or Sony, it might just end up being which has the better supply chain managers. Until they fix their inventory, I'll be refreshing retail websites—until I get desperate enough to buy that $15,000 Xbox on EBay. —Austin Carr | 
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