No, Michael Scott is a moron, not a jackass. He wouldn't pull this shit. He's tone deaf, he constantly thinks he's doing the right thing without realizing why what he's doing has the opposite of the intended effect even when it's obvious to everyone else. Giving a kid something he wants and then taking it away when no one's look is a move of calculated evil.

He'd imply heavily a PS5 then give the kid a Jersey, at no point would he actually have the thing in the kid's hand and then take it back.

Maybe that's just me, but I don't see Michael Scott as a character that would knowingly choose to do something immoral. He'd do a bad deed, but without realizing it.

Mike Scott's more the "We're taking away free tampons on the women's room, because we just don't have the money for luxury goods." type, who's then baffled when he's called sexist because he legitimately believed tampons were a luxury. Not the "Promote a woman? Are you insane? This is a man's office sweetheart!" type.

I could totally see Dwight taking the PS5 for himself and mocking the kid over it though. Even then he'd do it out of Chaos, not Evil.

It comes in the 2025 expansion that nobody asked for. :/

$500 for good press or $0 for bad. Looks like Charlotte is as bad at math as they are at basketball.

PlayStations?

I think I know where they could have gotten the idea.

In re-runs of old gameshows, it's not unheard of for them to edit the clips to look like the prize is Insert Sponsor Here, when the prize is actually something different. You can really notice this on Kid's Gameshows when the prize is something like an Xbox 360 for a gameshow that took place in 2002. (When a PS2 would be fair more likely)

However that's for RE-RUNS of PRE-TAPED SHOWS, meaning the person who won the original prize got the original prize and original airings would have shown said prize. The only "change" would been purely for advertisement purposes only.

That's very different from "You're getting an all-expenses paid trip to the Bahamas!" and then backstage they say "And here's an old Terminator T-Shirt or something, the one we had in storage that doesn't have the custard stain."

Which is very much what this situation was.

They probably heard about this practice and assumed that they could give a fake prize that's sponsor friendly, and then the real prize is something far less extravagant. Which tells me that they did not run this by their lawyers.

I can almost guarantee that one of them wanted the PS5 for themselves, and insisted on swapping it out so they could take the console.

Likely it cost more to have said meeting than the ps5 itself