So the Playstation3 comes out tomorrow in America, and if last week’s Japanese launch is any indication it will be a fiasco.
If you’ve been following the interwebs, especially on a site like Kotaku, you may have read that although ~84,000 PS3’s sold in Japan, only about 65,000 games did. That means about a quarter of those who bought the PS3 did not buy a single game. So why did they buy it? To resell it for profits on an online auction site of course!
Yahoo auctions (Japan’s ebay equivalent) quickly filled up with thousands of PS3 auctions, asking for ridiculously inflated prices (2 and 3 times retail). Apparently supply so exceeded demand that now – only a week later – you can pick one up for about retail. Busting the dreams of the sorts of people who paid homeless people to line up for 2 days to get a PS3! (<- true story) Anyway the same thing is happening here. Kotaku has links to stories and youtube videos of journalists going and interviewing people lined up outside American Best Buys and other stores, and an alarmingly large amount are up-front in saying they don't want the PS3 for themselves, they just want to resell it on ebay. I hope the auction prices crash like they did in Japan, and I hope in future companies like Sony come up with a scheme (such as not disallowing bundles) to limit this sort of greedy opportunism.
Incidentally the Wii is released Sunday. I have yet to hear about a single line anywhere in the country; or perhaps people are just waiting until after the PS3 (so the lines may begin Friday)? But Nintendo says they are shipping a lot, and the low price dissuades ebay profiteering as well.
While I don’t have a burning desire to have a Wii on launch (as I still have a bunch of great games in my queue), we’re still planning on hitting the stores (very) early Sunday to try for one. Expect it blogged if we succeed.
Personally I think Sony might be artificially limiting supply in order to create the chaos and thus get all the free news coverage.
And it’s not really ‘greedy opportunism’ it’s just the result of supply and demand. There’s enough people who demand to own a PS3 immediately and are prepared to pay more than the retail price for it. You can’t really call the people who step up to service that demand ‘greedy’.
If anything they are rational entrepreneurs, willing to take on substantial risk to deliver a product to a market that may well be gone inside a week.
Also they are providing short term employment to neglected part of society! 🙂
The people who are willing to pay more than retail price are stupid, no doubt.
One thing I can’t believe is the inability of retailers to manage the crowds this sort of demand generates. I read one Walmart manager actually made customers take a running race to see who would win the chance to buy a console. Of course people got hurt.