If you have a PS5, check your email because you might get a message from PlayStation with a very strange invitation: to sell it. In recent times, many things have been said without basis, such as Sony wants to remove the PS5 with a reader to justify abandoning the physical game or that it wants to recycle the components, but the explanation is simpler: Sony does not want users to buy four or five games a year.
You want to squeeze as much as possible out of each active user.
In short. With the Chiclana&Friends account, we get a screenshot of the email PlayStation is sending. Although this is an email in Spanish, the campaign is also being carried out internationally through messages to email accounts and the PlayStation mobile application. Come on, they want you to know that you can sell your console.
This is a campaign with the back market because it is to them that you sell the console and as we see in the American message, if you deliver the console in good condition and with two controllers, they will give you up to $400. Any damage to the machine may lower the rating. Back Market reviews it, gives you a valuation, and when you sell it, they put it back into circulation.
Sony only plays the role of mediator here, who sends the warning “You can do it.” There was already a partnership between the two companies, but now the message is not for you to change for a higher model, like going from a PS4 to a PS5 or a PS5 to a PS5 Pro, but to get rid of that ‘piece of furniture’ you used under the TV.
Email shared by Chiclana and friends
It makes sense. It sounds very strange but it is quite logical. A few months ago, Sony’s CEO, Hiroki Totoki, said that they’ve basically reached all the console users they can reach, and with a market that may not be growing at the pace they (and investors) want, it’s time to further monetize each user.
It’s… the math: If I have a PS5 and I buy a few games this year and I don’t subscribe to PlayStation Plus, Sony only sees a percentage of the sales of those two games. However, if I sell my console and another user who subscribes to Plus and who buys more games and among them ‘FIFA’ (because I refuse to call it FC) buys it, Sony sees money from both Plus and Ultimate Team Pack purchases (or any microtransactions in other games) every month.
For Sony, it doesn’t count as a console sold since that unit was already sold to me at the time, but if another more active user buys it and spends more on digital components, they’ll have money coming in month after month without having to do anything more than send them an email.
xbox thing. This may sound familiar to you as we have already talked about a similar case at Microsoft A few days ago we echoed how the Best Buy chain (hand in hand with Xbox) was doing something similar, urging users to sell their consoles. The readings are exactly the same, and this ensures that this machine has a second life in the home of a user who spends more money directly for the convenience of Xbox.
But, in the case of Xbox, there’s another reading that doesn’t apply to Sony’s situation: you can easily buy a PS5 in stores because there’s stock (at least the PS5 Pro is harder to get because of the base console), but there are markets where, outright, Xbox Series X and Series S are out of stock. Looking ahead to the launch of ‘GTA VI’, Xbox is keen to roll out all possible consoles to interested users, and those who use it to play a few games in 4K and not to watch movies.
A rare breed of cherry. But of course, the meaning I see in these two movements does not mean that they seem “outrageous” to me at a certain time because for the first time in history something has happened, that a company more or less clearly indicates that there are first and second line users.
This is another case of a very strange generation where, for reasons well known until now, consoles have gradually become more expensive after launch, it is also a generation that some of us consider the current consoles to be wasted due to the time of coexistence with the previous ones and, above all, the general state of the industry where hundreds of studios close and close every month.
crystal ball. Another question arises here, and that is whether we can see this with other technological products. I don’t see Apple sending out an email saying “If you don’t use your iPhone, sell it”, as much as it seems that they are having trouble making the models they want (especially in the case of the iPhone Duo), especially because there we see that the iPhone continues to grow in certain markets, which is not happening in the same way with consoles.
On the other hand there are AMD and Nvidia. It’s getting the crystal ball out, but if you have an RTX 3060 Ti, I don’t think Nvidia will send you an email asking you to sell them the GPU, but Nvidia knows that things can change for those with models like the RTX 5080 and, above all, the 5090. There it may be that the company itself invites it for another user so that they cannot send it to another user The servers themselves can focus those GPUs for AI Sam Altman, for example, would be happy if you sold him your RAM. But hey, this is just a general comment about a hypothetical situation that, at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened.
And I repeat that I understand that, in a sector where it seems that the ceiling has been reached because consoles no longer compete against them, but against platforms like Netflix or TikTok for that resource called “our time”, they need to make more money per user. If you allow me some advice, if you don’t use the machine and want to sell it, I know Wallapop is hell to fight for, but you can get more money selling directly to another user than what you are offering in these reseller programs.
Picture | PushSquare, Chiclana & Friends (edited)
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