Get your hands on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X this holiday season A great challenge. Not only are consumers competing with each other, but also against robots and vendors hoping to take advantage of the new console’s rarity. One bot, you can watch on Twitch, might offer some help. He checks inventory at a variety of online retailers every second.

The Twitch Channel It is run by Cam Ritz, which has used a publicly available program called street vendor – Described as “the world’s easiest and most powerful stock scanner” – to monitor PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles on Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, NewEgg, Walmart and other retailers. Watching the stream is currently a big wall of disappointment. Hundreds of updates every minute appear “out of stock” everywhere.

Ritz told Polygon that some of his viewers had disabled consoles by monitoring the broadcast. “I made this to help others, to be honest,” Ritz said in a direct message on Twitter. “[I] It was lucky last night even though one person got one of it [Sam’s Club]Yesterday, we got lucky with some people who got Xbox Series Xs from GameStop. “

Ritz said it already scored a console when pre-orders go live, and may add more retailers to its watchlist. Funnily enough, even Ritz has been monitoring another source of stocks: Twitter user Wario64, Which also frequently notifies its followers about the PS5 and Xbox Series X at a variety of retailers.

Even if you don’t record a new console thanks to this bot – which, incidentally, you can operate on your own – there is some comfort in seeing a real-time briefing reinforcing how difficult it is to find one right now.