So if you search on your local Craigslist and eBay you’ll see that the just released PS3 is selling for ridiculous amounts of money. Yeah, the release was limited supply, and there are certainly fanatics out there, but it seems that people are totally delusional about how much these things are really worth. Almost all the reports I’ve seen so far have the majority of people who camped out in line doing so with the express intent of selling their purchase immediately online.
Look, I know that there are people out there with a ton of money who just HAVE to have the lastest thing and are willing to buy things for 2-3x retail. But just how many could there really be?
My local Craigslist (which is a fairly small town) has no less than 25 listings for PS3s with prices starting at $1600.
God Bless America! There has been a Pit thread going about this for the last few days. In it there is a link to a youtube video where some guy waited three days in line to be the first to get one and then walked straight outside and in front of everyone waiting in line smashed it with a sledge hammer.
Take comfort in the fact that the secondary market for PS3s is now flooded. It seems like almost everyone who bought it got their just to resell it.
Sadly I doubt that any of the initial people are going to lose money or be stuck with it. I think the demand for a PS3 over $800 is probably more than 100k (though not much more) and the people willing to pay $700 or $800 will probably still be buying them up through the end of the year.
I just don’t understand how the intersection of “dumb enough to pay $thousands for a video game system that’s going to be worth $500 in a year” and “has $thousands” is as large as it is.
Yeah I’ve seen those auctions (if you log into eBay you can do a search for “completed listings”). Most of them seem pretty unreal, though, and I have a hard time believing that someone will end up collecting on them. Anyone who’s been watching eBay for a while knows that there’s a big difference between getting huge bids and actually getting paid.
It’s going to come as a shock to these buyers that the thing has been seriously over-hyped. I read a geek review on the NYT today that panned it for the most part, saying it doesn’t even come near to living up to expectations.
I’m taking a pair of courses right now in Systems Engineering and Program Management, and every week we hear “find out what the customer wants before you design it” and “don’t ruin your product by adding features they don’t need”. It seems intuitive, but Sony hasn’t figured it out yet. Honestly, I can’t believe someone at Sony hasn’t been fired over this. Launching with too little supply means that the artificial excess of demand creates artificial value. That is value going in some non-Sony person’s pockets, when two months from now it would likely be spent on PS3 games, accessories, T-shirts, and BLU-Ray movies. Now that value is going to college students with lots of free time, Chinese immigrants hired by Japanese businessmen, self-appointed middlemen, cat burglars, armed robbers, scam artists, and eBay.
Worse yet, the publicity shackles their product to whatever ridiculously high price the public hears: $10,000 makes a good example. Monday at the lunch table, everyone says “Ten thousand dollars - imagine the poor people you could feed with that. No game system is worth that. I wouldn’t buy one if it were half the sticker price!” …and now Junior is getting a Wii and six launch titles for Christmas instead.
The nonsense about Sony “intentionally” shorting stock is b.s. – they’re taking a $240 loss on each unit they sell this launch season, and doing it on purpose to get units in living rooms, and the only way that expense will have been worth it is if they get LOTS of units in living rooms. Otherwise, Blu-Ray will be Beta v2.0, and the PS3 will be remembered fondly alongside the Jaguar and the TurboGrafx 16. Adding the Blu-Ray player is probably what sank them: they can’t get their manufacturing yield up, they insisted on putting one in each machine, and it’s absolutely murder on the per-unit price.
The program manager for the Playstation 3 release had a few goals to accomplish for Sony:
get PS3 into the North American market for Christmas (or risk seeing X-Box 360 eat up more of the market)
make sure the PS3 works
include a Blu-Ray player to cement Sony’s format dominance
deliver adequate quantities
don’t go over budget
It looks like someone in the chain of command sacrificed most of the other goals in favor of the Blu-Ray player and being fast to market; we’ll see pretty soon whether the PS3 functions as advertised. I honestly think that we’ll see this hit Sony in the stock price when Q4 2006 numbers come out – I think the misstep here is that big. Full disclosure: in a few weeks, when I can find them on the shelves, I’ll be buying one of the 4,000,000 Wiis that Nintendo shipped over here.
Taco Bell is apparently offering $12,500 worth of Taco Bell products to the first person who donates a PS3 to a California Boys and Girls Club. This should provide adequate sustenance for the Doctor Who marathon.
I love this, because like watching Jerry Springer, it gives me a reason to feel better about myself compared to some of the other inhabitants of this planet.
I see a logic in camping out for a gaming system if it’s what you lust after, and you’re willing to pay the consequences of doing so (being uncomfortable, people shoving and pushing, encountering people at 3 a.m. who are a little on the shady side, missing work and/or school if you are doing either). I also see the logic in doing so if you can mark it up over 200 percent. That’s pretty smart.
What I don’t get are those who will drop the $10,000 for the fucking thing. It’s a Rev A model first of all. Count on weird things going wrong with it. Wait for the next revision! Second, as others have noted, you can get one of the systems currently out with a bigger selection of software for much less. So when you get tired of the five games that are out you can find something else to play. Last, why are you buying it? If you’re an adult you should be used to having to wait for something. Why not wait 'til January or whenever they’ll be in stores? If you’re buying it for a child, what the fuck is wrong with you? Better you put $10K in a trust fund or in a college tuition plan than a video machine that will be obsolete in 5 years. You should have told Junior, “As much as I’d like to get you a PS3, they’re not making enough of them right now - you can either ask for something else in time for Christmas, or get the gift in January.” (And that’s me being generous. I’ll be damned if I’m dropping $600 for a game machine for a dependent in my household who doesn’t bring in a paycheck, but hey, YMMV.)
And in case you were wondering… I bought a PS2 on eBay back in '00, paid $450 for it, and while I have certainly enjoyed it, I could have waited a few weeks for them to appear in stores. There were only a few games out at the time and I played games on my PC more at the time.
I can understand waiting in line to buy one to make a profit, but I don’t understand paying that much money or waiting in line that long just to play Madden. I heard that some people wanted one early for bragging rights. That’s just lame.
Yeah, the question isn’t why do people pay ridiculous amounts of money for things. But rather, why do people pay ridiculous amounts of money for things that they’re making as fast and as many of as possible. To be perfectly plain, these things aren’t rare, they’re just early.
Some people make enough money that $1500 is not a huge purchase, especially if it also buys exclusivity. They spend $10,000 on a couch or a TV, so what’s the big deal?
Search “PS3 Smash” on you tube to find the video, it says at the end that he smashed up this unit and is selling a second unit on eBay. so I assume he will make enough money from ebaying the 2nd unit to cover the price of both.