if you are able to do a resale at a much higher price, the price from Sony or whatever should be higher. The bots are just discovering the real market price. Not sure why they don't raise the price to whatever the bots are selling at.
Because if they do this, the response will be "Sony is greedy charging people all this money for something that only costs them $x to make."
I am not accusing you of this, just linking this to statements and thoughts that often arise in this context. A very typical response to questions about why something costs what it does is, "It's just supply and demand. Econ 101." But it's not just Econ 101. Supply and Demand is covered in Econ 101, but economic activity is far more advanced than supply and demand. Brand perception, customer good will, supplier agreements, retailing agreements.. all of these are major factors in determine "what" the price of an item is when it appears on the shelf. This is the work of entire teams at companies as big as Sony.
"then stop buying it"
Sony will never actually say this. But this would be the 'cynical capitalist' response.
It's far better to let the scalpers take the reputational hit.
"This company is price-gouging me due to temporary circumstances" definitely impacts brand perception, customer goodwill, etc
If they make 50$ extra on the console, but the buyer buys no games, or buys a bad one and decides not to buy more on the console, that's a net loss right out, and an opportunity lost because the console didn't go to someone who would buy two, one of which they loved and caused them to buy three more.
It's the opposite of the iPhone situation - apple makes the majority of its money (on average) from the phone sale itself - people wait in line to give apple 30% off the top, even if they never buy an app or a song. So apple having a shortage slows down their profit this quarter, sony having a shortage slows down their loss this quarter and their profit 2023Q2.
It's short-term vs long term value of a customer, and the console makers are arguably making a better decision given the lifespan of a console.
If they want to milk it the best is focus on higher cost bundles etc until manufacturing catches up.
Every popular console has had issues like this, I remember the Wiifinders being a really big deal for two Christmases in a row.
But what of consumer goodwill? What of lost downstream profit from games and services sales if people decide to forgo a console due to the MSRP?
Some people may be willing to stomach the price from resellers, would they if it was Sony etc. pricing it at that level?
You might benefit from reading this article on Price Anchoring:
https://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/181199/price-anc...
Consumers don't see it this way. They often latch on to completely "irrational" cues in forming opinions of a brand. See: "Apple Tax." Note: I put "irrational" in quotes to indicate that consumers exhibit un-intuitive behavior. It's not actually a value judgement about the behavior itself, only indicating that in a purely supply-and-demand driven market environment, these behaviors would not be exhibited.
If the PS5 equilibrium price is say... €800 (the buy it now price on ebay right now), and Sony raises prices to that level, some number of customers are going to throw in the towel and buy an xbox, with the loss of €120/yr PS plus revenue, 30% of their game purchases, etc. to MS.
Is this number of people and their spend higher than Sony will gain from pocketing what scalpers currently are? Clearly at Sony HQ they either suspect it will be or are too scared to find out.
Compare the GPU shortage where both major manufacturers were affected and hence retail prices did go up and per AIB card makers, at least part of that was nvidia and amd. Because their market didn't have an instock competitor to worry about, and a big chunk of their market (miners) were more economically focused on expected returns vs cost, while consumers for entertainment products may not look at it from such a calculating perspective.