In the wake of PlayStation 5’s preorder fiasco, a number of analysts in the industry reported on the curious case of the cheaper PS5 Digital Edition, which seems to be in severe shortage worldwide from the get-go. Sites like Video Games Chronicle and Ars Technica heard from retail sources in Europe and North America, respectively, who informed the publications that stock allocation for the Digital Edition was significantly lower than the Standard Edition’s.
Ars Technica further reported that Best Buy’s Canadian website showed an allocation of 19,000 Standard Edition preorders and just 3,000 Digital Edition preorders on Wednesday. The publication separately confirmed preorder allocations at nine GameStop stores in different locations, and found that this seemed to be a trend.
When AV Watch quizzed Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan about this, the executive refused to share the ratio of Digital Edition consoles to Standard Edition consoles, but said that the company is still trying to predict demand for both units.
“The ratio between the Digital Edition and the disc drive model is currently something we cannot disclose at this time,” he told AV Watch (translation via VGC). “We cannot give specific information on numbers, but we can say that we plan to produce the necessary number of units to meet the demand for that model type. However, we’ve never produced two different console models at the same time before so deciding on the right number and the right ratio is very hard to know. We are doing our best to predict demand.”
We’ll update our readers when we have more information.
[Source: Ars Technica, VGC]
