PS5’s December 6 India restock — predictably — came and disappeared in minutes. New pre-orders for the PlayStation 5 and PS5 Digital Edition went live at 12pm noon on Monday, and all the stock was gone under a minute on most websites. I managed to add a PS5 Digital Edition bundle to cart on Amazon, but it was out of stock by the time I hit checkout. I couldn’t even do as much on Sony Center website ShopAtSC, where the “add to cart” button had switched back to “notify me” under a minute. Croma had a similar problem, as it showed no stock left in under two minutes. I never even saw the buy button on Flipkart, Vijay Sales, or Prepaid Gamer Card. Flipkart seemed to be stuck on “coming soon” the entire time. Vijay Sales simply said “currently unavailable”.
On Reliance Digital, the buy button appeared after several minutes, but then after I put in my address pincode, Reliance Digital said: “Product with code ‘491936181’ not found!” I got the same error with multiple pincodes. Game Loot ran into a database connection error / “503 Service Unavailable” error, and its site failed to load at all. And as always, the Games The Shop website struggled to load, even as third-party trackers showed that the site was claiming to have PS5 stock. If you managed to get to the complete order page on Amazon, Croma, Flipkart, Game Loot, Games The Shop, Prepaid Gamer Card, Reliance Digital, ShopAtSC, or Vijay Sales, let me know in the comments below.
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PS5’s December 6 restock ended up being the same story, as it has been ever since India restocks began in May. Sony continues to bring in very few PS5 and PS5 Digital Edition units into India despite repeatedly witnessing staggering demand. On top of that, none of India’s online retailing giants can build a website that can withstand the PS5 pre-order load. And with demand outpacing supply globally into 2022, the situation isn’t going to get better anytime soon. This was only the seventh pre-order phase for PS5 Digital Edition, and the tenth for the PS5. No date on the next round of PS5 India pre-orders yet, but given the gap in November and this early December slot, another one later in the month is possible.
The December PS5 India pre-orders will begin shipping December 15, according to Amazon, Sony Center, and Vijay Sales. Expect the others — Croma, Flipkart, Game Loot, Games The Shop, Prepaid Gamer Card, and Reliance Digital — to ship PS5 pre-orders in and around the same date. On the past few occasions, online retailers have sent out PlayStation orders prior to the given date, so if you’re lucky, you might get it before the promised date. Of course, the delivery date will also depend on if retailers take in more bookings than they can fulfill. Some platforms have been known to cancel or delay PS5 pre-orders as well.
All the PS5 restock for December 6 seems to be gone for now, but you can keep an eye on the nine aforementioned websites and register for notifications, if you like. You might have better luck checking with a game store near you though. Sony India has also set up a helpline at 1800-103-7799 to help PlayStation fans find local retailers across India.
PS5 vs Xbox Series X: Which is the best “next-gen” console in India? We discussed this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.