In less than a week, a petition demanding an India PS5 restock date has more than doubled the number of consoles officially sold by Sony in the country. At the time of filing this story, the Change.org petition has over 9,000 signatures. For comparison’s sake, import data suggests that Sony had around 4,000 PS5s at launch.
The petition surpassed Sony’s official sales two days ago. This is the latest in a long line of attempts from Indian gamers to ensure Sony takes them seriously. This follows the fan base rallying around the #RestockPS5India hashtag on Twitter, the community’s zero tolerance policy against scalpers, and assistance in the form of user-created bots to help would be buyers.
The Indian gaming community has been incredibly vocal about being treated with respect, on par with the company’s customers in developed markets.
For its part, Sony has maintained stoic silence. While it hasn’t responded to this, and doesn’t respond to queries regarding restocks in general, IGN India understands that the company is aware of the PS5 petition. What comes of this awareness however, is yet to be seen.
How long Sony stays quiet will be of interest. Reason being, the company’s silence has already impacted PS5 sales in the country and damaged the PlayStation brand as well. This is because some prospective PS5 owners have already decided to vote with their wallets and went for the Xbox Series X or S instead.
Throw low double digit India pre-orders for critical darling Returnal (which incidentally, has made it to game stores across the country on time for its April 30 launch) due to backlash against steep pricing, and it appears that Sony has its work cut out for it, if it plans to maintain its 90 percent market share.
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