PS5 stock at John Lewis will be early morning drop this week

More PS5 consoles will be available this week, with Currys PC World rumoured to be starting a randomly selected lottery system.

March was supposed to see a major increase in the amount of stock available for the PlayStation 5 and so far that’s exactly what’s happened, with most major, and even some minor, UK retailers getting more consoles last week.

There’s more to come this week as well, with John Lewis, AO, Very, and Currys PC World all preparing to sell a new wave of stock.

The only problem is that it’s not yet clear which day the consoles will be put on sale, only that John Lewis is planning to do it ‘very early’ in the morning to stop their site from crashing – a practice that has been criticised before for favouring scalpers.

Argos in particular has often relied on releasing stock as early as 3am in the morning, which is no inconvenience to a scalper using a bot to buy consoles automatically but clearly a pain for ordinary customers – who aren’t even guaranteed they’ll get one, even if they do stay up.

Currys PC World has attempted to use more high-tech methods to confound scalpers, but their anti-bot software was itself blamed for causing their site to go down last time they had stock.

Fans have noted they’ve been updating their PlayStation 5 pages again this week though, with a new plan to use a lottery type system where you can register for a ‘priority pass’, with the hope that you’ll be randomly selected to have the chance to buy a console.

Whether that works or not remains to be seen, but Box.co.uk was praised for doing something similar with its Xbox Series X allocations.

Twitter channel PS5 UK Stock – Instant Updates, which has proven very accurate so far, claims that Curry’s next stock drop will be ‘huge’ but the real question is whether that will benefit scalpers or legitimate customers.

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