Meet the streamer who helps PS5 buyers beat bots and scalpers

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 moments later, the consoles have been restocked and Randall’s legion floods into the breach to refresh the checkout page. As people discuss their successes and failures, the chat lightens up.

Randall has been a prominent console-buying influencer in the United States for two years. More than 400 000 followers follow Randall. on TwitterYouTube had 180,000 subscribers, with the majority showing up as soon as the pre-orders began for the new console in 2020. Although streaming success is notoriously hard to achieve, Randall achieved it by becoming a master of the difficult art of buying PlayStation 5s. He also showed others how to buy them. Randall cracked the code to viral success with a simple Chrome browser and lots of patience.

“Every retailer is so unique. It’s all just trial and error for me, figuring out what works. I don’t use bots, I’m not a reseller, and all the knowledge I’ve gained would only help another person like me; a common consumer just trying to buy one console for themselves,” says Randall, in an interview with Polygon. “I think when people are trying to buy this stuff without a stream on in the background they don’t know what they’re doing. They become discouraged. Honestly, the number one thing for me is just providing encouragement.”

Randall began streaming YouTube videos in 2019 – a year prior to the arrival of the new ninth generation video gaming consoles. His physical health had a profound impact on his ability to launch his YouTube channel. Randall was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when he was 5 years old and has wrestled with the disease’s debilitating fatigue for decades. Randall discovered COVID-19 in the United States a few years before. He began to use a new treatment which restored much of Randall’s energy. People with cystic Fibrosis live an average 40-year life expectancy. Randall believes that these grim predictions will be avoided.

In that period, he discovered some new passions. He even started a daily newspaper. Pokémon Sword & Shield Broadcast on YouTube to small, but tightly-knit viewers.

“I was able to get up to 1,000 subscribers in a month, and then Animal Crossing [New Horizons] came out a few months later and I pivoted to that,” says Randall. “By August of 2020, I had reached nearly 5,000.”

It’s extremely difficult for streamers to find any semblance of an audience, so Randall had plenty to be proud of with those numbers. But the burgeoning hardware mania — and the subsequent supply chain chaos — was what made him a superstar.

Randall’s initial success happened by accident. On a whim, he streamed his efforts to order a PS5 to ensure his success. Randall simply watched the GameStop site on Sept 25, 2020 and waited to get his hands on the new console, just like other potential customers around the globe. Console hunting isn’t a particularly cinematic experience. His viewership grew by a staggering tenfold, triple, and quadruple, well beyond the few hundred who watched his streams. Randall was able to see his stream from the peak of its popularity with 10,000 viewers.

“Maybe it was just really searchable in YouTube’s algorithm,” he says. “I don’t know what was going on.” His viewership numbers have been going up ever since.

Randall was able to strike gold after the first pre-order session. He remained alert for any possible restockings. When news of any of these rare payloads circulated on social media, Randall fired up his streaming computer. The purchase of a new console in autumn 2020 was already very strategic. This meant that it required 24-hour monitoring.

Randall quickly made contacts with top-level insiders from big boxes like Target, Best Buy and GameStop who advised him about possible shipments as well as the drop dates. In fact, he’d been making connections since his first-ever pre-order broadcast, when a GameStop employee entered the chat and provided a backdoor link allowing him, and his viewers, to skip the line for a purchase, Randall says.

The demand for new consoles grew exponentially over the next months. This scene has automated its operation using bots that seamlessly pierce online retail infrastructure to grab hundreds of consoles. In the face of an inexorable shortage of semiconductors, there is likely to be a high demand for these consoles. In these conditions, it is easy to see why YouTube has become the top choice for frustrated gamers all across America.

Randall doesn’t recall a specific moment when it became clear that PS5 and Xbox Series X storehouses would remain limited for the long haul, but Randall certainly didn’t expect to be sitting in retail queues deep into 2022. “I thought it’d be good for a while and that I’d pivot to something else down the road, but it lasted for so long and it turned into my main thing,” he says.

There are plenty of people who join Randall’s stream, cop their long-desired PS5, and disappear right back into the void. He’s fine with that cycle; Randall understands that he is providing a service, and many viewers happily move along once they land a console. But Randall also tells me that he has some regulars who stick around even when they’re no longer in the market for a machine. “It’s probably less than 10 percent of all people, but the number one comment I get is, ‘Jake, I came for the PS5 but I stayed for you,’” he says. “Some people will be in my community for life, others will rotate in and out.”

I get it. Yes, I’m one of Many gamers who still haven’t landed a PS5, so I have a somewhat transactional interest in Randall’s stream whenever he is live. And yet I’m drawn to the compellingly tense vibe to his craft that I don’t find in my usual diet of sedate Hearthstone streams. The audience can be seen as either winning or losing, hoping for the best. This It will be the moment when all the stars align. Randall leans into the fidgety consumer high. Every stream is ramped up with a “hype session” in which he spins around in his computer chair and throws a pair of finger guns in the air. “If you’ve been having a hard time securing your PS5, today will be that magical day,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for two years. I won’t fail you.”

There are some signs, however that supply chain problems are beginning to be addressed. It’s getting easier to pick up an Xbox Series X in the wild, and while PS5s remain scarce, Target is now allowing its local stores to sell their inventory without collaborating on any national restock schemes. Perhaps we’re not too far away from a world in which everyone with a desire for a new console is able to purchase it without any assistance of an expert streamer. This is exactly how retail is meant to operate.

Randall, where is that? He tells me he’s been asked this question constantly for the last two years, ever since he started shepherding viewers through that first pre-order gambit. Randall would like to make more content about his journey with cystic fibrosis; after all, he’s got plenty of stories to share. But he’s also not worried about his current streaming format. Randall believes that there will always be another scarcity on the horizon — another bauble of gamers’ envy — and given the way scalpers have come for sneakers, graphics cards, and consoles, he might not be wrong.

“There’s always the next big thing coming out,” he says. “Always the next product that everyone wants. And with the chip shortage there’s probably going to be high demand for products after they launch. As long as I’m passionate about the products, I will be streaming that.”