Tips For Finding A PS5 This Holiday Season

More than a year after the PlayStation 5 launched, it's still a very hard console to find. With the ongoing semiconductor shortage impacting consumer electronics manufacturers worldwide, it probably won't get any easier to find a PS5 in the short term, either. We won't lie: it's going to be difficult to get a PS5 this holiday season, but these tips might give you an edge in finding one.

There's a lot of clickbait about PS5 restocks out there, with headlines that seem to promise information on upcoming restocks paired with articles that ultimately say nothing at all. It can be infuriating to land on one of those articles, but you can avoid a lot of them by checking out the technology section of Google News on the regular.

I've noticed that, in recent months at least, Google News has become a good way to find out about incoming stock drops for both the PS5 and Xbox Series X. Obviously, Google News isn't very handy when it comes to unannounced stock drops, but when a retailer announces ahead of time that it has an impending PS5 restock, there's a good chance that you'll be able to read about it there. If nothing else, checking Google News a few times throughout the day beats following a bunch of retailers on Twitter and trying to keep up with all their announcements.

This tip is admittedly a little strange at first blush, but it can potentially save you a lot of time. There's at least one Twitch live stream that tracks PS5 and Xbox Series X restocks at various retailers and alerts viewers when new stock is detected. The only stream I've found that does this is KillerCam1020, though those of you who are on the prowl for new PC hardware can also check out Falcodrin, which runs a very similar Twitch tracker for GPU stock.

Following KillerCam1020 and running the stream in the background whenever you happen to be at your computer is a hands-off way to follow PS5 restocks at a pretty wide selection of retailers, including Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, Ant Online, Sam's Club, and PlayStation Direct. The alarm the stream plays when new PS5 stock is detected is suitably loud and annoying so there's no chance you'll miss it, and the stream is otherwise silent so you can focus on whatever else you're doing while it runs in the background.

KillerCam1020 is an excellent way to better your chances at getting a PS5 without having to put in a ton of leg work yourself. There are a few downsides to this method, though. First, the stream actually has to be open before you can get alerts about new PS5 stock. Second, the stream only tracks US stock, so this tip doesn't really do much for our EU brothers and sisters trying to score a PS5 for themselves.

Following StockDrops is probably the best tip I can give because it has actually worked for me in the past. These days, StockDrops has an app you can download, but joining the Discord also works (you can find links to both on the StockDrops website). When you join the Discord server, you can sign up for alerts for all sorts of hard-to-find hardware, whether it's the PS5, Xbox Series X, or any number of GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD.

If you join and sign up to receive alerts about new PS5 stock, you'll only be pinged when new stock is available, while all other notifications will remain muted. Joining the StockDrops Discord is how I managed to snag the RTX 3070 that sits in the very machine I'm using to write this article, so joining up and setting your notification preferences is something I enthusiastically recommend.

Again, there are some drawbacks to this one (because no method is perfect). If you only join the Discord, you need to be ready to act when that notification comes through, and though StockDrops says that the desktop app gives the fastest notifications, I don't have any experience with that. StockDrops also has a considerable following – there are thousands upon thousands of people in that server – so you're potentially still competing with many others for your PS5.

To supplement this article, you should also have a look at our PS5 and Xbox Series X tips guide from last year. Many, if not all, of those tips are still relevant today, so if you're in the market for a PS5, give that article a read for even more strategies to give you an edge. Even though you're now armed with tips and tricks, landing a PS5 during the busiest shopping period of the year is going to be a challenge, so good luck to you if you're giving it a shot.