Sony absolutely did sell consoles directly to consumers. That's how I got mine lol.
Sony has absolutely no interest in enabling scalpers. They gain nothing, and in fact lose out on revenue because of it themselves. The PS5 initially sold at a loss, with the assumption that buying games, accessories, and subscriptions will turn the whole ecosystem profitable for Sony. Scalpers arent buying subscriptions. They probably aren't buying games because the digital market makes the supply close to infinite. They probably aren't buying accessories because the supply was similarly not restricted. So the only thing scalpers are doing is giving Sony a loss, delay the consumer's ability to buy anything that's profitable from Sony, then taking more cash out of the hands of consumers that, arguably, might have been used to buy more games/subscriptions/accessories. Sony has absolutely nothing to gain and quite a bit to lose from scalping.
Scalping affects all kinds of industries. It's only even possible when demand exceeds supply at a given price point. I have no reason whatsoever to believe Sony was purposefully restricting supply (it was in their best interests to produce as many units as possible).
Any further action restricting scalpers would be the responsibility of retailers. Sony can't just force Target or Wal-Mart to incur additional expenses to start tracking who is buying PS5's and restricting those. Even when retailers do it, it's usually a joke to work around. Heck, the minimum-wage employees tasked with enforcing such rules might be the ones doing some scalping to try to supplement their income.
The only way to eliminate scalping is to make it unprofitable. One way of doing that is... Just don't buy from scalpers. But consumers cannot organize and behave rationally like thaf- the free market is often a downward spiral of bad decisions, and a lot of casual consumers just don't care about spending a couple hundred dollars more.
The other way is to raise prices. If Sony and Wal-Mart are selling something for $500 and a scalper can flip it on eBay for $900, getting $400.... That means that consumers are willing to pay $900 for that item. Perhaps it should have originally sold at retail for closer to $900? But then the narrative would be that Sony was overcharging- that the PS5 was a luxury item for rich people only. Even if it sold out, the stigma would stick for the whole generation (like the PS3).
Sony made a product everyone really wanted and charged less than they could, and you want to blame Sony for actions of all the people between you and them?
You said the experience of building a PC was great (it can be- I've built several myself), but aren't you forgetting about all the shortages, supply machines issues, and scalping that happen within that industry as well? I never saw pictures of cryptofarms with tens or hundreds of PS5's hooked up. NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD have all received criticism for not doing enough to prevent scalping for various product launches over the past few years- are you bringing the same energy to them?
Nintendo arguably has restricted supply artificially with things like Amibo and there were allegations they did so with the Wii as well. Are you boycotting them?
It's perfectly fine to just... Not want a PS5. PC's are good too, and a lot of people have both.
ITT: a bunch of people saying "I won't".
You're probably in the minority. There's 16k subscribers in this community and, currently, about 30 million active users on Steam. Most of them have never heard of Lemmy, and heck a lot of them probably were never on Reddit. The PS5 has sold 50 million units- that's over 3,000 PS5's for every subscribed account here.
A lot of users here have PC's that approach or exceed the PS5's capabilities. You have fancy expensive monitors, a nice desk and chair, a gaming mouse and mechanical keyboard. The people this CEO is talking about don't. They may have an old desktop from the pandemic, or a laptop. They might just use their kitchen table as a desk.
Or, heck, they might not even have a desktop or laptop at all. It's still early, but there have been studies suggesting that Gen Z and Alpha are using PC's less and doing more of their computing on phones and tablets.
Overall I thought it was great that Sony started releasing their games on PC (and especially through Steam, usually with pretty decent PC ports). It's great to give consumers more options. Delaying the PC release probably means more time for the devs to work on the port (Sony's PC ports have been mixed on launch, but even the bad ones have gotten fixed pretty quickly afterwards, and it's been a while since the last one). Delaying PC versions seems like a pretty reasonable compromise.