Sony PS5 price, availability, and pre-order problems, Quest 2, more tech news!

Here it is, the next-gen Sony PlayStation 5, with pricing and availability! Finally! Yesterday evening, Sony announced the PlayStation 5 costs $499.99 (disc-based) and $399.99 (Digital Edition, no differences other than missing a disc-drive and slimmer body). It releases Thursday November 12, 2020 in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. It’ll be out Thursday November 19th, 2020 in the rest of the world, meaning many of the usual first-release countries like the UK, Germany, France, and India have to wait a week. Pricing is £449/€499 and/£359/€399. China was confirmed as a release country, but Sony excluded it from a release schedule for now. 2021? The good news: This pricing is competitive. While the lower-spec Xbox Series S undercuts the PS5 Digital Edition by $100, it is lower-spec. At the top, the Series X and the PS5 with optical drive are both $500. It’s a little bit odd that the optical drive is worth $100 but I humbly suggest it’s totally worth it. If you only ever download games, you’ll save $100. But for those that rent games, buy games, swap with friends, trade-in, re-sell, having discs is super worthwhile. And confusingly, for reasons I cannot explain, discs sent in the mail or picked up in-store are often cheaper than digital editions. Pre-order problems: Pre-orders have begun today, but with Sony working with what it calls “select retailers,” there’s some chaos figuring out how to get one. Some pre-orders started at midnight. Those waking up early but at normal person hours to get one found it’s sold out everywhere. The likes of Best Buy saw its website crash, Amazon had limited availability. There are loads of stories already where people missed out or got lucky. There’s also a touch more demand because there are hints that there may be a shortage of consoles available, something Sony denied. The consensus: Sony just didn’t handle this well, which led to this kind of thing: And while Microsoft has been having fun being allchummy (Twitter) with PlayStation, it did take note of the pre-order shemozzle and issue a ‘we’ll do it better’ type tweet. Also: PlayStation 5’s list of launch games starts taking shape, including the 10 biggest announcements from yesterday’s showcase but some games will be priced at $69.99 as that $60 mark is breached (Polygon). The new DualSense 5 will also be $69.99.