Update 3:

One of the DTI complainants reached out to the OMG team to share their personal complaint against the retailer pertaining to the issue of the cancellation of preorders. This personal account clears the reseller of any connection to the complaint.

The customer claims to have successfully preordered a PS5 unit during the wave 2 window only to see the order cancelled even after full payment has been made. After no reply through the retailer Facebook page, the customer called the office directly and spoke to a representative that said the cancellation was due to a glitch in the system. The customer was then instructed to do the refund process by themselves through Dragonpay.

Attached below is a copy of the complaint from the customer, names erased for anonymity.

Update 2:

The OMG team received an anonymous tip referencing the alleged original post from where this all started. In this post, there was no reference to the reseller nor any evidence linking them together as of writing. Connections between both parties remain purely speculative at this point.

Update 1:

u/Decadentrebel clarifies that the image but was lifted from a Facebook post that they couldn’t link to Reddit, saying “The guy who posted it claims that his Gamextreme preorder was canceled and alleges in his complaint that there’s a conspiracy with Zeebee because of a warehouse photo.”

Editor’s note:

As of writing, there’s probably no way to know whether the complaint (and the screenshot of the complaint) is actually a valid and legit claim, so do take this with a grain of salt.

Original:

Alright, this is pretty juicy if proven true.

As the title says, there have been reports popping up that there was a party that actually complained to DTI about a specific authorized retailer in GameXtreme because of the recent PS5 preorders.

As per a post on r/Philippines by u/Decadentrebel, the thread includes a screenshot of the DTI complaint filed against GameXtreme PH. Based on the title of the Reddit post, GameXtreme allegedly cancelled preorders and conspired with a local reseller Zeebee Manila to sell overpriced PS5 stocks. This is a serious claim, but nothing about the alleged conspiracy is actually seen in the complaint, only mentioned in the title of the thread.

GameXtreme has 2 days to explain and settle such allegations.

You can check out the said Reddit thread below:

As the local gamers would know, it is very hard to acquire stocks of the PlayStation 5. During the first wave of units last December 11, majority of the gaming public took an L across various retailers due to extremely limited stocks. Some retailers like Gameline even had to issue refunds due to technical issues that allowed customers to “purchase beyond our available stocks”. GameXtreme is one of the many authorized retailers of the PS5, along with Datablitz and Game One PH just to name a few.

So, who is Zeebee Manila?

Zeebee Manila is one of the many local resellers that sell a variety of products, but mostly revolve around game consoles. They are well known in the local gaming circles as the ones who sold a huge number of Nintendo Switch units at exorbitant prices last year.

Browsing through their Facebook page, it can be seen that as early as November 11, they posted a pre-order request for the PlayStation 5. Now this is nothing alarming in itself, but for a product that is sold out everywhere even up to this day, gathering pre-orders assumes that they have a certain number of units to sell and somewhere to get it from to fulfill the pre-orders. Pretty standard practice.

A comment from them on the same thread even says “pre order slot full [sic]”, which is not surprising given the hype for the console.

In a succeeding post on December 10, exactly one day before the official PS5 launch in the Philippines, Zeebee posted their official price of PHP48,000, a PHP20,000 increase from the retail price. Apparently, they have 30 units to sell. 1 unit is hard enough to get, so 30 is quite the haul, and that the release date would be on December 24.

So… where did they get their stocks? No one knows for sure, although another post by them shows the back of the console with Japanese characters, indicating that these are Japan boxed units. Highly likely that some of their units may have indeed come from abroad through various means.

As everyone knows, the second batch of stocks graced local retailers last January 22, which also sold out in less than 5 minutes. Stocks were again extremely limited, and if the Toy Kingdom raffle was anything to go by, retailers had around 30 or so units to shuffle around. Of course this number is purely an estimate and is only based on the number of winners that were announced by TK.

In any case, as early as January 23, Zeebee Manila once again posted a restock notice, but this time, a pricier bundle that included a number of games and an extra controller for PHP60,500. This bundle, as mentioned by some members of the community, comes from the Middle East, hence the inflated prices. The interesting thing about it is that these recent posts come with a 7 day unit replacement and 1 year local service warranty as per the FB posts. It could very well be that the December batch had the same warranty arrangement as well but it just wasn’t indicated in their previous posts, there is no way to say for certain.

The warranty guarantee is quite amusing, since it could indicate that they got the stocks locally. In normal practice, you would need to provide the receipt of the store you purchased it from to avail of the warranty but in this case, maybe you would have to send it back to Zeebee instead? We’re not quite sure how that works, but it is quite a curious arrangement.

One more thing that makes this interesting is that there have been rumblings in the community that there is an alleged image posted by Zeebee of a warehouse where they get their stocks from, which is probably why GameXtreme is being connected to them. The local community is also tying this to the string of refunds that GameXtreme offered to once thought successful preorders, only to be cancelled on the last minute. Of course, the connection between GameXtreme and Zeebee is all just speculation for now until definitive proof comes along, but quite a number of members of the community have spoken up to confirm that the preorder cancellations are indeed true.

As of writing, GameXtreme has not offered any official statement about the incident yet, so it will be interesting to see if the deny any allegations and clear this up properly with the personalities involved. This story is developing and we will post updates as we get them.