Meet the streamer who helps PS5 buyers beat bots and scalpers

polygon.com:

Join one of Jake Randall’s streams and he appears, in the corner of the screen, sitting with his back against a bookshelf that’s overflowing with video game jewel cases. He’s staring down an online retailer in the nervy minutes before a PlayStation 5 restock. Today, the target is Amazon, and Randall educates the crowd with his most dependable console-rustling axioms: Be an Amazon Prime member or free trial holder, go to the PS5 page and click “add to list,” have one tab open with the the product page and one with said list, and attempt to buy the hardware from both sources once the “add to cart” buttons unlock. He explains that it’s common to fail dozens and dozens of times before you are successful, and to repeat these steps until the process works.

A few minutes later the consoles are restocked, and the legion of Randall pours through the breach, refreshing the checkout page over and over again. The chat lights up as people share successes and failures.

For the past two years, Randall has been one of the preeminent console purchasing influencers in the world. He has more than 400,000 followers <a href=«https://twitter.com/Jake_Randall_YT?ref_src=» https: www.polygon.com>on Twitter

and 180,000 subscribers on YouTube, the bulk of whom showed up in late 2020 as pre-orders for the new console became available. Streaming stardom is infamously elusive, but Randall broke through by mastering an exceedingly difficult art: becoming really good at buying PlayStation 5s, and being willing to show others how to do the same thing. He cracked the furtive code of viral fame; all he needed was a Chrome browser and a lot of patience.

“Every retailer is so unique. It’s all just trial and error for me, figuring out what works. I don’t