I actually got in on the Day One preorders, and have a brand new Xbox One showing up on Friday.
My friends and brother did not plan ahead so well, so they’re just waiting for the hype to die down before they buy theirs.
So what I’m wondering is whether there’ll be any sort of absurd hype and inflated prices nearing Xmas of this year, and if I’m better off not opening it in hopes of Ebaying it for big $$$ come mid-December, or if there will be plenty and I should just open it up on Friday and go to town?
So far, it appears that on Amazon, their publishing dates are 12/31/2013, but they say they’ll ship as soon as more are available.
Anyone know anything or have any good ideas how this’ll work? Is this just BS intended to raise day one sales, or is it really a shortage of consoles?
Pick up your console. Go on ebay. See if the average selling price for an Xbox One is significantly more than you paid for the console. If so, sell it. Profit.
The word on the grapevine is that the lions share of preorders and gamer interest is going to Sony. This is because Sony is offering significantly more powerful hardware : faster memory, a bigger GPU, and a less bloated OS for $100 less. The hardware between the two consoles are so similar that cross porting games will be trivial, so there should be many opportunities during the life of the consoles to compare them.
Therefore, it seems more likely that it will be the PS4s fetching a King’s ransom on ebay, but who knows. It’s all speculation.
The PS4s weren’t doing well on Ebay as of yesterday a few minutes prior to my 1st post.
Anyway, the question is whether or not anyone foresees enough demand to say… cause Xbox Ones to go for at least $150 more than list price on Ebay.
It’s a sort of opportunity cost problem- I know what I’ll get if I open it up right away, and I have some inkling of what I’ll lose if I leave it in the box in hopes of Ebaying it around Xmas. What I don’t know is what the actual cash payoff might be.
I mean, I’d be pretty happy if I kept it in the box, waited until Xmas, and ebayed the thing for $750-1000. I’d be pretty pissed if I did the same, but didn’t get an offer that would beat my $500 reserve- I’d have not used the thing for a month for no reason.
Would you pay 750-1000 dollars for the privilege of having an Xbox One by Christmas, if the alternative is getting one without problems for significantly less in January? No? Well, that’s an indicator that there might not be that many others who would, and that the market price of the thing on ebay around Christmaswill not rise to that amount. Of course, it’s possible that other people’s preferences differ from yours; nobody knows for sure (and if anybody knew for sure, they would likely not share this information here but rather speculate with this privileged knowledge on their own account). But my guess is that you won’t find a buyer willing to pay you these premiums for your earlybird console, so my advice would be to just unbox it and have fun.
The last time I can recall that this happened, with the Wiis and the PS 3s, the ebay price shot up right on launch day. The ebay price stayed $150+ over list price for months until Sony and/or Nintendo managed to produce enough to meet demand.
So you won’t have to wait. Grab your console. Check ebay.
Realistically, if prices shoot up again, then if you take your console out of the box it will not reduce the selling price by much. Just keep the original box + packaging, don’t damage the box in opening it up, and people on ebay will treat it about the same with regards to sale price.
Heck, what I do when I sell used electronics on ebay is I take some windex and remove all fingerprints. I get the thing looking as pristine as when it came out of the box the first time. If you’d only used the console for a month or so before selling it, it would look great.
Microsoft is actually confident that you will be able to pick up a bone on friday, without having pre-ordered. In my area, looking at both craigslist and kajiji, the ps4 is listed at maybe a hundred over retail.
I don’t know about “confident”, all the retailers were given a specific number of preorders that MS knew they could fill. those pre-orders MS communicated to the stores will be filled. Stores will receive some floor units as well for Day One. If a particular store oversold their preorder allotment it could eat into the floor models. It all depends on how the store chose to do their business.
I would assume more units will be made available for Black Friday as most places should sell out over this weekend.
Also people keep claiming the PS4 is a much better bargain but if you buy the camera (which is now sold out) the price difference is closer to $20.
Well… I got my question answered for me this morning. Apparently Amazon miraculously has more Xbox Ones for ordering- my brother not only pre-ordered one, but will get it on Friday just like I will.
Almost certainly the cost differential is that the Xbox One comes with Kinnect, while Sony decided not to pack in the Eye. Xbox made too big a deal about the new Kinnect features to remove it from the console. They are pretty much banking on people wanting an Xbox to be more than a gaming system.
Xbox - get an advanced sensor in the box, thus every game that can use it will be able to use it.
PS4 - save $100 and also get a faster console along with it. PS4 has
faster memory (though Xbox uses a caching strategy so this is probably almost a wash), has a faster GPU, and more of the processor/memory is dedicated to the games.
Given the consoles are in almost every other way identical - exact same CPU, same architecture of GPU, etc, it is reasonable to think that every game released will be available on both consoles, except when Microsoft/Sony go out of their way to stop this. (by paying bribes to make a specific game an exclusive, but the bribe has to exceed the estimates sales from making it dual platform, so this won’t happen much)