Sony has issued an apology following the PS5 pre-order fiasco that's taken place this week, promising that more consoles will be available to pre-order in the coming days and weeks. Many fans were upset with Sony after it enabled this horrendous pre-order bottleneck, but it seeks to make amends by issuing a surprisingly sincere (if brief and characteristically vague) apology.
On September 16, Sony held the PS5 Showcase event, which finally revealed the release date and price for both of its next-gen consoles and that pre-orders would start on the following day. Amidst various other bits of misinformation during the showcase, it seems retailers were not provided correct information, as some began to allow pre-orders on the afternoon of the reveal event. Expectedly, websites were flooded with pre-order purchases as new pre-order listings were discovered; over the next few days, websites of businesses like Walmart and GameStop would crash due to the heavy influx of traffic.
Three days later, Sony has issued an apology over Twitter for its wanton mismanagement of pre-orders as the PS5's manufacturer. The official PlayStation Twitter stated today, "Let’s be honest: PS5 preorders could have been a lot smoother. We truly apologize for that." The company also claims that more PS5 consoles would be released to meet pre-order demand, though it's leaving it up to retailers to share the important details. Sony also stated that more PS5 consoles would be "available through the end of the year," which doesn't much help those would-be pre-order customers who obviously want their consoles on its November 12 launch day.
Microsoft took a couple opportunities to jab at Sony for its supply chain negligence, even taking the initiative to provide specific Xbox Series S/X pre-order times and locations. While Sony did state that it apologizes for the inconvenience, it hasn't done much else to prepare for the still unending wave of pre-orders its been ensuring all this time. Maybe Sony should follow Microsoft's lead on this one and provide a bit more information.
While Sony has an impressive line-up of exclusive titles coming to the PS5, the way it is handling pre-orders of the consoles is not as impressive. It also doesn't help that there were multiple games from the showcase that claimed they would be coming PC or other consoles eventually despite actually being PS5 exclusive titles. A few titles also failed to mention that they would be launch titles, making the entire event an exciting but confusing series of announcements.
The PlayStation 5 will be available on November 12, 2020 in select countries and globally on November 19, 2020. Pre-orders are available now.
Source: PlayStation