Consider the following a reminder that market actions can look vastly different depending on involvement & ones own mindset:

Sony sold only 197,000 units of its PlayStation3 games console in the US last month, well below sales of Nintendo’s rival Wii, because of supply problems.

It had aimed to put 400,000 PS3s into the biggest market for video games for the release of its next-generation machine in November. But the figures from researcher NPD Group show it achieved less than 200,000. In contrast, Nintendo’s rival Wii console outsold the PS3 by more than two-to-one, selling 476,000 units in November.

The PS3 went on sale on November 17 and the Wii on November 19. Both products quickly sold out and have been reaching prices well in excess of their respective $599 and $250 price tags on websites such as eBay.

This has been bad news for video game publishers, who have seen “attach rates” on average of only one game being sold along with every PS3 console and two for the Wii, rather than the three or four that would normally be expected. (emphasis mine)

From a pure economic standpoint, this makes perfect sense: some people want them more than others & are willing to pay more for it, plain and simple. My personal, non-economic view of it is that the onespaying the regular price are impatient & the ones buying these consoles on eBay for upwards of a G are, to put it scientifically, fucking insane. Early adopters of new technology are who these companies make the majority of their money off of, past the saturation point the profit potential sinks. Besides, you don’t want to rush to the store only to find out down the line you got stuck with the next BetaMax, do you? As for the ones getting them on auctions, I find it especially odd in the case of the PS3, since many people (including myself) thought the $600 retail was too much.

Just had a thought: I’ve got a way that some gaming company in the future could potentially take advantage of this willingness to pay anything for a hot game system. Suppose instead of selling the systems the traditional way, they had it so the initial sales for a certain time period would be all in the form of auctions, spread out into different areas? Then, after that period was up or sales reached a certain point, they then put the rest of the consoles in the stores the regular way at a fraction of the average final sale price. They could ensure a profit on initial sales by targetting exactly the people that would pay anything for it, without having to have consoles gather dust on the shelves waiting for the rest of us to buy it, & with that they could afford to deliberately do traditional sales at a loss in comparison, giving late-adopters a huge bargain.  It’d be a more direct version of what’s happening now.