That doesn't make any sense. You're charting demand as being equal to supply.
That's like saying Coke doesn't sell better than XSX because it's always in stock.
You can't sell what's not on shelves. And people aren't not willing to spend 300 to buy something they don't want; your argument doesn't flow properly in both directions.
It cannot be 'Just not a good sign it wont seem to sell out', and at the same time it's the best selling device for Black Friday.
If it's outselling the competition, supply constraints or not, it's selling more; therefore people want it.
It doesn't matter than it's still on shelves and PS5/XSX are not; about the only knowledge you gain from that fact is that demand has not yet outstripped supply.
But that has no bearing on sales performance. Series S not having a bottleneck around supply does not have any indication of sales performance as we see here on Black Friday. It's still on shelves, but it's among the best selling items in _all_ categories of Black Friday.
Scalping prices is not a direct indicator of demand either. Things that are are not supply constrained cannot be scalped. It's an indication of demand relative to the amount of available supply.
Price points matter. The idea that everyone who bought a $300 XSS, is more than happy to spend $500 on XSX/PS5, but couldn't and settled for a $300 is deaf commentary in a world that is just coming out of recession and unemployment from covid. Yes XSS does count as a substitute good in some ways, but it's not that strong of a substitute good.
$299 with or without discounts is still by far the cheapest way to get into next gen gaming, (if you side step xcloud).
Using basic Economics 101 class: Hypothetical chart of various products. I have given a large demand advantage to PS5 and moved XSS demand to far left to provide it the perceived 'no one wants it'. But I also gave it the best supply curve as it is by far the cheapest to produce (with XSX being the most expensive to produce), and you can see in totality, even in this scenario with 'low demand' and high supply, it still sells more units than PS5.
I want to be clear, this is not reflective of anything in real life, or is this filled with real data. But looking at how well stocked shelves are and correlating that to unit sales is probably the incorrect way to look at it.
We can only assume that the equilibrium points "are" the starting prices of the consoles. In order for there to be discounts in pricing and therefore 'increase sales" if the demand curve stays the same, unit supply has to improve in order to allow for it, or the business loses money. We could keep moving the PS5 demand to the right to better model the PS5 craze, but if you cannot move the PS5 supply graph to the right, you cannot sell more; the price only goes up.
