The SBP Archives - Your less than frequent dose of SBP!

Yesterday's release of Sony's Playstation 3 console is another example of what happens when a combination of greed & want mixed with cash leaves a bloody trail behind.

Sony released 400,000 PS3 consoles for North America, where a launch of about 1,000,000 units would have probably met demand and leave a lot of satisfied customers. Instead, citing "manufacturing" issues, Sony cut back on the number to be sold on the launch date. This created an extremely high demand for the product, and a lot of people who got their hands on one didn't get it to use for themselves, but to sell on Ebay and make a huge profit. I've tracked some units that sold for $2,500-$3,000US before the official release date. With a price of about $660, that's a huge profit margin. (Just one day later, prices have dropped to about $1200-$1500 per unit on Ebay).

Knowing such a demand existed, and that people interested in buying it would be willing to wait in line hours or even days before the official sale date with money in their pockets, thieves went to work. In Hartford, two armed thugs tried to rob a line of people waiting for the new system and shot a man who refused to give up his money. Two people were arrested in Fresno after a crowd trampled people in a parking lot. Another shopper was beaten and robbed of his PlayStation 3 just minutes after he bought it at a store in Manchester.

I admit, I was checking the Bestbuy website who released 10 consoles every hour to see if I could exploit people's want and make a quick buck off it. The site would always crash though and I could never get through. But it sort of dawned on me perhaps I'm sort of contributing to the behaviour of the previous paragraph by participating in the "secondary market" of PlayStation 3 selling.

Don't think for a second Sony executives feel bad about this. They love the hype this situation has caused, injuries and robberies be damned. To them, it justifies charging the most ever for a mainstream console, and demand will not be curtailed while parents feel they are not doing a good job raising little Jimmy if they don't give him the present he wants when Christmas rolls around.

I guess it just sort of saddens me reading up on stories like this. Is it something we really need? Is it something worth getting shot over? How about those poor teenagers who saved up their money and waited in line for hours eagerly waiting to get their PS3, only to be mugged a short time later? I hope some new manner of distribution will occur in the future when something of this hype is released. It's definitely not worth the agony people are suffering for the way it is done now, all for the sake of an overpriced black box.