Max Berry, author of Jennifer Government
Not that I-m saying Sony deliberately engineered a stock shortage and then hired an assassin to shoot someone in the stampede in order to build up the hype. That would be unspeakably immoral. To rip off the opening of Jennifer Government so blatantly, I mean.
In his book, a Nike executive engineers a shortage of highly anticipated sneakers and then hires an assassin to shoot someone in the crowd in order to build up "street cred" for the sneaker.
Personally, I think the stock shortage (the numbers of PS3 have since been revised to an estimated 125,000-175,000 at North America launch) had more to do with the fact that Sony is losing upwards of $300 per console than any other factor.
Of course, with that stock shortage, it means that the 36,000 PS3 I initially surveyed as being available on eBay on launch day comprised almost 20 - 30% of total North American stock. At present, there's a little short of 16,000 systems available, most averaging between $600 to $900, and close to 68,000 completed PS3 auctions. If we take each listing as being authentic, that's almost 84,000 PS3s on eBay. Now, there are the scams or people selling things that aren't exactly consoles, but that likely to comprise less than 5% -- so we are talking about almost half the stock(48%) to two-thirds (67%) ultimately winding up on eBay. Just think about that for a moment -- up to 2 out of every 3 PS3s in North America ended up on eBay.
This is not some super-exclusive item, this is a video game system that will be found in every toy store, outdated and sell for less than $300 in a few years.
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