Jim Ryan on PS5 stock: "Absolutely everything is sold"
But the shortage isn't because of COVID-19
When it comes to stocks of PS5, "everything is sold."
That's according to PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, who discussed the system's early success with the Russian news agency TASS. We know when PS5 stock will be coming back to stores, but it sounds like Sony isn't sitting on any big stockpiles that haven't been shipped out to retailers yet.
"Everything is sold. Absolutely everything is sold," Ryan said. "And everything will be sold in Russia, there’s no doubt about that. I’ve spent much of the last year trying to be sure that we can generate enough demand for the product. And now in terms of my executive bandwidth I’m spending a lot more time on trying to increase supply to meet that demand."
The console has seen stock shortages ever since it hit the market earlier this month, which Ryan said is largely due to strong demand rather than any production issues that stemmed from the pandemic: "We might have had a few more to sell, but not very many: the guys on the production/manufacturing side have worked miracles."
Ryan said he "wouldn’t plan on doing another big console launch in the midst of a global pandemic." While it didn't end up affecting the bottom line of console availability all that much, he said it was challenging. The company even had to do the prep for manufacturing by remote camera. Cue mental images of an engineer in China holding a circuit board up to a webcam and engineers in America and Japan squinting at the picture on their Zoom call.
That's probably not actually what happened, but Ryan still sounded amazed the team was able to make it all work: "I mean, just imagine that for a precision device like the PlayStation 5."
See what's coming next to Sony's latest console with our guide to upcoming PS5 games.
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I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.
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