I know someone who let her son camp out to buy the PS3 with the sole purpose of selling it on ebay. He was 26th on line. He met lots of interesting people and had fun with his friends. This morning, he came home before the store opened. Apparently, someone offered him $600 for his place in line. He thought about the hassle of selling and shipping, took the $600 and went home. A good day’s pay for a 14-year old.
(In case you’re about to have apoplexy about a 14-year old camping out at a store all night, parents took turns hanging out with him and his friends so an adult would always be around.)
I admire his spirit. I’d never had come up with a scheme like that at 14.
If people want to spend their time camping out in the cold and rain and whatever for a PS3, that’s their business. IMO, it’s no less (more) silly than camping out for the premiere of Star Wars XXIV.
The only thing that irks me is that I don’t think the PS3 is worth the effort. It’s definitely not worth getting robbed at gunpoint over. It’s just a fuckin’ video-game system, folks!
The gunpoint robbery had nothing to do with the PS3. It could have been any place where you’d have a bunch of people lined up with cash in their pockets.
You really need to read the quotes you respond to. Yachts do not prevent other people from having things. Scalpers make it so that the guy who would have been 30th in line is now 31st in line at the store with 30 units. He put his time in, he waited with everyone else, and goes home emptyhanded.
Maybe it’s not rational, but I can’t look at the scalper and Mr. 31 at the same time and give the scalper a thumbs up.
That’s the problem. The guy looking to turn a profit on buying a PS3 has every bit as much right to one as the guy putting it under a tree or going home to play Madden.
Sure, but how many other products get high-profile launches punctuated with folks standing in line for days on end for midnight openings? Even when Apple releases their new iPods, it’s generally a case of “Okay, the stores have them now” and not “You have to get in the queue now to have a snowball’s chance of getting one.”
So, then, we have a moral judgement rule then? “Ok, you scalpers get in the back. If you want it for yourself- you’re next, then dudes who want it for their kids, then first in line are those who want it for the kid dying of cancer in the hospital” :rolleyes: :dubious:
You see this is because if there are only 30, and there are 31 guys, then even if none of are scalper’s #31 is going home without one. And, then how about that scalper “He put his time in, he waited with everyone else” didn’t he? Do the scalpers get to cut in line or something?
That Wal-Mart is actually about an hour and change outside of Boston - I know that because, depressingly enough, it’s my local Wal-Mart. Like, if I were the kind of crazy person who would wait overnight to buy a game system, that’s line I’d have been in :eek: I actually know a guy who was planning on trying to get a Wii there early Sunday morning - wonder if it’ll make him change his plans.
As for the topic… eh, it’s not something I can get especially worked up about. I don’t know that it’s necessarily something we should be all peachy-happy about, but I don’t see any way to fix it that wouldn’t be much more troublesome. Then again, I was lucky enough to outgrow the kind of crazy that I had going on when the N64 came out a couple of console-generations back, while a lot of people I know are a lot more… um… passionate.
Additionally, where’s the percentage for Sony in warehousing 4,000,000 units instead of 400,000? Extra cost per unit when Sony is already theoretically losing on the unit itself. Occam’s all around here, jumping up and down, waving his arms, and everyone still wants conspiracies that make absolutely no economic sense for Sony. Someone please take the razor away from Occam, before he gives up for good.
I believe Sony is losing something around $300 for each core unit and $220 for each… not core unit. Those numbers are from memory though, and quite possibly from a dubious source anyway, but they’re definitely losing a fair bit of money. Also, the game to system sales ratio isn’t looking so excellent - I think it was something like 0.9:1 in Japan. Money is made on game licensing with these things, so Sony is definitely down a fair bit of money from this launch, and the more consoles they sell, the more down they are.
However, I still think they’d benefit greatly from having 4,000,000 units for launch instead of 400,000. If there are few enough PS3s in consumers’ hands compared to XBox 360s and Wiis, developers might start to wonder why they’re making PS3 exclusives in the first place. If Square-Enix jumps ship, the eerie similarities to the N64’s failure will have reached a critical level, in my opinion.
(by the way, I agree - there’s no conspiracy from Sony here)
That’s exactly right, and the fact is, the guy who is going to make a big profit on it is probably a lot more motivated to wait in line than a guy who just wants to use the product, and knows if he doesn’t get one now, he can get it later. So the majority of people in line may very well have been the scalpers, but anyone was welcome to wait in line if they so chose…they just lacked the appropriate motivation.
There’s no way in hell that Sony secretly has a stash of PS3s squirreled away somewhere, to be released at just the right time to make a killing. They’ve been scrambling to get the thing out the door for months. Sony had to provide test hardware to the developers well in advance of the launch, and those were delayed and in short supply as well. On top of that, they kept sending out firmware updates for the PS3 about every other week, and the online protocols were still buggy just a few weeks ago. It’s rather difficult to test online functionality when you can’t get online reliably. Sony absolutely did not have a good handle on this launch, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool.
Let me put it to you another way. At EA they have “platform specialists” who know all the intricacies of a particular brand of console. The Sony guy, who had held the job for several years, was freaking out all over the place at all the problems with the PS3. Meanwhile the Nintendo guy, who had worked in the department for a long time but had only just got the specialist job, was quite well pleased with the Wii.
Marked up by middlemen? If you put a PS3 on eBay today with a starting price of 1 dollar, market demand would mark up the price, not the “scalper”. The scalper doesn’t set the selling price, market demand does.
Eh. They spent a lot of time and money for a stunt with low awesomeness value. The awesomeness might have been increased if they dropped it off a building, or threw it in front of a passing truck, or something more spectacular.
After looking at the current Ebay listings, I think we can classify at least some of the resellers as vultures. This guy had the chutzpah to set the initial price at a million bucks, and there’s quite a few more with initial prices over $10,000. Buyers bidding up the price to those levels is one thing, but these sellers are blatanly greedy and stupid. I wouldn’t be too surprised if at least some of those listings were scams.
