“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”

There might not be a better phrase to explain how it feels to be a gamer right now.

On one hand, quarantining and lockdowns have let everyone spend so much more time gaming. Sales of almost every single gaming device have skyrocketed through 2020 and almost any metric related to gaming has seen a similar boost. From sales, to hours played, to gaming streams watched.

On the other hand, this unexpected rise in demand for gaming devices, combined with the release of brand new hardware have caused a massive shortage of said products.

It currently feels impossible to find a PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S or RTX 3080 graphics card at retail price. As a result, the secondhand market for such products has exploded with products selling way over MSRP.

But how bad is it really? How much are consumers paying over MSRP to get their hands on the latest consoles and GPUs?

Well, we used ParseHub, a free and powerful web scraper to scrape thousands of “sold” listings on eBay to find out.

And the numbers are not that pretty. Here’s what we found...

PlayStation 5

The PlayStation 5 comes in 2 different forms. A Disc variant ($499 MSRP) and a Digital-only variant ($399 MSRP).

We scraped over 9,500 of the most recent “sold” PS5 listings on eBay to find out the average price customers are paying for these consoles.

On average, gamers are paying $798.05 for the Disc variant of the PS5. That’s 59.95% over MSRP ($499).

Things get worse when looking at the Digital variant of the PS5. Through MSRP prices, the Digital edition of the PS5 is 20% cheaper than the disc version ($499 to $399).

However, on the secondhand market, the digital edition is only selling at an average of $759.22, only 4.87% under the disc edition. It seems as both variants of the console are almost seen as the same in the secondhand market.

This means that the digital variant of the PlayStation 5 is being sold at an average of 90.28% over MSRP.

PlayStation 5 Price Trend

Not all hope is lost with PlayStation 5 prices.

When looking at our dataset chronologically, we can observe a downward trend in pricing for these consoles as more supply is manufactured and keeps up to demand.

This is especially true for the Digital variant of the console, as it’s price is decreasing at a higher rate than the Disc edition.

Xbox Series X

Let’s now turn our attention to Microsoft and their new console, the XBOX Series X.

Like the disc version of the PS5, the XBOX Series X (XSX) has a MSRP of $499. However, the secondhand market of the XSX paints a drastically different picture.

We scraped over 9,500 of the most recent “sold” XSX listing on eBay to find out the average price that people are paying for the console.

On average, gamers are paying $729.03 for the XBOX Series X console. That represents a 46.10% increase over MSRP. Not as bad as the PS5, but still pretty bad.

Xbox Series X Trend

Unlike the PS5, prices for the XSX seem to stay rather consistent.

When looking at our dataset chronologically, we can see a small dip in average prices for the console in January of 2021. However, ever since then, prices have recovered and spiked on some days.

Nvidia RTX 3080

Last year, Nvidia announced the release of their new generation of RTX graphics cards, including their flagship RTX 3080 GPU.

Ever since their release, these GPUs have been consistently out of stock while facing incredibly high levels of demand. This makes sense as demand for new GPUs is not only coming from gamers but also from other GPU users such as cryptocurrency miners.

The RTX 3080 has an MSRP of $699.00 for Nvidia’s Founder Edition of the card. However, other RTX 3080 manufacturers such as EVGA or ASUS can set MSRP for their variants that are more expensive.

We scraped over 9500 of the latest “sold” RTX 3080 listings on eBay. We discovered that, on average, consumers are paying $1397.02 for an RTX 3080 GPU which represents a 99.86% increase on MSRP.

When we look at our dataset in chronological order, we can see that the price at which these GPUs are sold is steadily trending up through 2021.

This is mostly due to massive shortages of GPU chips due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These shortages have affected the supply of these products despite the introduction of new GPUs in Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series.

Mixed with a recent boom in the crypto market, demand for these GPUs seems to continue to grow, making it even harder for manufacturers to keep up.

Scraping eBay data

At the end of the day, the only solution to this secondhand market problem will be a significant increase in production from manufacturers. This will make it easier for consumers to buy these devices from official retailers and will drive their secondhand market prices down.

Want to run this same type of analysis for other product categories? Check out our guide on how to scrape data from eBay using a free web scraper.