Prices have come down a lot on eBay.de as far as I can tell. The Disc PS5 going for 750-800€ now, was almost 1000€ around launch.
Still a long way to go until they sell at 500€, you would need Amazon and co. to consistenly have stock for sale over a long period of time before a scalper would sell at 0€ profit minus eBay fees.
My guess is that next Christmas PS5's still won't be on shelves but will be ca. 600€ on eBay.
That said, the pro scalpers are only part of the problem. All that media coverage attracted a lot of amateur scalpers that flip only one or two consoles. A guy at work (who had a PS5 since launch) keeps tabs on all the twitter feeds and discords and snatched up at least 3-4 PS5s this year to flip them at an easy 200-300€ profit a pop.
There are ways to slow down bots and scripts but no chance to stop guys like this.
you are right, it's pro scalpers as well as amateur. (Much like what crypto mining became)
I remember the story that ~33k ps5's were sold the first two weeks of launch through eBay…and that's just eBay, not including 3rd party Amazon or StockX or places like that…and that was just sales at over $1000 a piece. Didn't account for unsold stock.
I can only assume hundreds of thousands of consoles being bought at launch by scalpers.
And then I remember in Dec/Jan of that year, numerous sites and YouTube videos teaching people how to create their own scripting bots to try and tackle each stock drop if they so choose
I see username after username on 3rd party selling sites of a single person (entity) having already sold 200-400 ps5's. They are buying in bulk, no doubt hoarding under the assumption of major holiday sales as the professionals keep supply dribbling out to a minimum (much like the diamond market)
Just looking at StockX right now, the average ps5 sale is still $200-$300 above retail price. With that kind of profit, the scalper market will still treat them like GameStop shares, betting on their value to provide a profit for the forseable future as normal demand is still prevented from being met by this perpetual scalper industry machine.