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The Dark Side of the PlayStation 3 Launch
An anonymous reader writes "Kotaku is running an article prompted by an email from a foreign student in Japan. The reader unveils the sad reality of the modern gaming industry. Japanese businessmen made ample use of homeless people and Chinese nationals to obtain PS3s for re-sale. There was also a large amount of pushing and shoving, some fights, and almost no police presence at the most crowded stores." From the article: "Based on my observations of the first twenty PS3s sold at Bic Camera, they were all purchased by Chinese nationals, none of whom bought any software. After making their purchase, television crews asked for interviews but all were declined. These temporary owners of PS3s would then make their way down the street where their bosses waited. After several minutes, a dozen PS3s were rounded up, as their Japanese business manager paid out cash to those who waited in line for them. I witnessed a homeless-looking Chinese man, in his sixties or seventies get paid 20,000 yen for his services and was then sent away." Update: 11/12 05:40 GMT by Z : You're right. Sony only shares a portion of the blame here. Offsides on my part.
Why is Sony getting blamed here?
Congratulations, Sony. Nicely done.
The end users who buy from these middlemen are *every bit* as guilty as Sony or the middlemen. If it weren't for these buyers, there would be no market for the middlemen.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Congratulations, Sony. Nicely done.
Heaven forbid we blame the scalpers... or the people willing to buy a PS3 at a premium from the scalpers. Why would we do that when there is a giant corporation we can blame for the ills of society? Damn that holiday season, we are helpless against the dynamic duo: Christmas and Sony. Won't somebody think of the children (especially those who will be deprived of a PS3 this christmas?)
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
I don't see much of a problem here. The people who purchased had the money, theirs or not they should get the product. If I can afford dozens of PS3s and can afford to pay dozens of bums to stand in line and buy them, then I'll get dozens of PS3s. How can their be a law against that in a country that regards itself as free (Japan)?
I fail to see how Sony is in any way responsible.
There's not really any practical way of preventing scalping is there?
- float the price high enough to stifle demand (almost there already!)
- somehow make a PS3 un-transferrable (can you imagine the screams?)
- magically come up with more PS3s
- wait until the factories are running full-bore before starting to release any PS3s
Now, concert and sport ticket scalping is another story, but not I think relevant here.
Anyhow IMO blaming Sony for this -- or even really considering it to be a problem -- is pretty mistaken.
Some homeless guys don't get to play with their new PS3s... I'm crying my little heart out here.
Congratulations, Sony. Nicely done.
Ok, so Sony makes a product, a lot of people want it, some resort to unscrupulous tactics to get them, and somehow that's Sony's fault?
All this Sony bashing is getting ri-goddamned-diculous.
Don't get me wrong, Sony has done a lot of bad shit, and has been very arrogant when it comes to the PS3, but this kind of behavior should be attributed expressly to the consumers. Okay, one might argue that Sony created an artificial shortage (blue laser conspiracy?), but that's no reason someone has to be an asshole. It isn't a necessary product, so the fault lies almost entirely on the consumers.
Come on, Zonk. I'm pretty anti-Sony, too, but you don't need to redirect blame for something like this. There's lots of other stuff Sony has done to be called on.
It's amusing to me that folks have no problem with somebody dropping hundreds of dollars on a console, but hiring homeless people to scalp them is some huge crime. Obviously the homeless guys felt taking some money to wait in a line was a better use of their time than whatever else they'd normally do--they made out here. As for the people who hired them, well...would you expect Steve Jobs to mow his own lawn? Why should he, if he can afford to pay someone else to do it. And as for Sony, like any company, they respond to incentives: in this case, fewer units = more demand. If you don't like it, change their incentives by not buying their shit.
People making profit from a high demand for a low supply of items? Shock!
How we know is more important than what we know.
These Japanese businessmen should be ashamed!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Yeah, I don't see the problem either...you end up with 3 happy people. The homeless guy gets paid for standing in line... The middle man makes a nice little profit... The end user with lots of money gets one of the first units without having to stand in line (and these are probably the exact customers that sony will want to have their system - they buy all the latest games right at release instead of waiting for them to hit the bargin bin)...
WTF is uncivilized about buying something is underpriced and selling it for a profit?
WTF is uncivilized about hiring people who are homeless?
Man, you people have some fucked up values.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Wow, I really don't know where to begin with your post.
The Cell chip is expensive and difficult to manufacture. (Although each cell die has 7 cores, 8 are manufactured on each die in the expectation that one will fail. Post-manufacture testing finds the broken core and disables it, finds no broken cores and disables one anyway, or finds the whole chip ruined and scraps it.) That, and the expensive Blu-Ray drives are difficult to make, too.
They sell at $600 a pop. They'll go on eBay for much more than that, I'm sure. The amount of money Sony could make is limited by how fast they can produce consoles. So, do you think Sony is making consoles as fast as humanly possible, or do you think Sony has no interest in money?
And, under communism, there would be no PS3. What part of a state-run economy do you think values game consoles? Values them enough to invest millions in research and billions in retooling factories for the new tech? State run farms in Russia, China, Cuba, and Venezuela left/leave people starving. You think a system in which people lack "standard issued Mao Ze Dong [sic]" bread are going to have PS3s? Or televisions? I'm sure they'd settle for houses.
You also forget that capitalism is the reason the PS3 exists in the first place - if Sony didn't have a chance to make $bucks, do you think they'd spend years developing the console? Crawl out of your hole and show me a communist nation that even has Playstation 2s? (China ceased to be communist for all practical intents and purposes when they, shock, adopted mostly-free market capitalism as their economic system)
DATABASE WOW WOW
"Update: 11/12 05:40 GMT by Z : You're right. Sony only shares a portion of the blame here. Offsides on my part."
Oh, they only share a portion of the blame? That's awfully magnanimous of you, but just exactly why should they take any blame? What should they have done? NOT sold a PS3 to someone because they looked shabby? Should they have insisted on some sort of contract that the customer signs that promises to not resell it?
This is just shameful. Honestly, did Zonk's mom used to beat him with a playstation or something? The constant Sony-bashing is just insane. And it's not like you have to look real far to find something they actually DID that was wrong.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
it's called greed and exploitation?
No, it's called capitalism.
> it's called greed and exploitation?
Is it greed and exploitation and such a bad thing to you when non-homeless people get jobs?
WTF.
Indeed, keep in mind that 20000 yen is over $150 USD.. This isn't bumvertising, it's people being paid a chunk of cash to wait in line.
Ugh, yeah... Sony's creating an artificial scarcity to lower their shipments to be way below demand rather then sell out of 500k or more units at launch. That whole blu-ray component shortage was just a fake excuse. It's a vast conspiracy that includes other blu-ray manufactures. Because selling less units then they can make is good for business.
Hmmm... Pie...
The end users who buy from these middlemen are *every bit* as guilty as Sony or the middlemen.
Which is to say, guilty of exactly nothing. Guilty of giving a little bit of paying work to homeless people. Anybody thought to ask the homeless people what they thought of the deal? No that would make too much sense.
What a stupid troll article, the only interesting thing is how many responders took the bait uncritically.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
That said, it's funny to see the same fanbois that criticized MS for all of the issues surrounding the 360 launch (fights, eBay profiteering, etc.), run to Sony's defense when it happens to their console launch.
Fanboys? How about people who just think that it's absolutely ridiculous and nonsensical to blame the company? It wasn't Microsoft's fault, it's not Sony's fault, and it won't be Nintendo's fault at the Wii launch.
You can blame both companies for just not making enough supply to meet demand
Er, no, you can't blame the companies. They are/were pumping them out as quickly as they can/could. The blame here (if there is any in the first place) lies solely with the people doing it. Honestly, what are the companies supposed to do? Only begin to sell them once they have enough for EVERYONE IN THE WORLD who wants one to buy one?
Seriously, how is Sony to blame for this IN ANY WAY?
The retail establishment clearly did not prepare for the launch properly, and was clearly unable to control the mob that gathered. They should have requested police prescense as soon as they saw the line was starting to become excessively large (when a single file line turns into a 10 people standing next to each other file line, its time to call the cops).
Sony did not ask rich Japanese men to pay poor/homeless Chinese people $200 to basically hang out in a line and buy a console from a store (pretty good deal, I'd do it, especially if I was homeless). It's not like the Chinese were being asked to dance naked and pleasure themselves. If anything, the rich Japanese guys who paid them to stand in line were doing them a FAVOR.
I worked in retail consumer electronics through two generations of hardware launches (PS1 to PS2) and I can tell you that this shop was totally unprepared for the launch. You can see maybe like, one , two employees tops (we had a quarter of our staff of 40 for PS1, and over half for PS2), we had requested two uniformed police officers almost a month in advance for crowd control (and we got them, of course), and the second time around (For DC/PS2/Xbox/Xbox360), we waited til around 7am and handed out vouchers to people who were lined up, guaranteeing them a console if they returned to the store before noon and presented the voucher. Best Buy did the same thing when I went there on GameCube's launch day to get a GC for myself. They handed out vouchers a bit after 7am; that way, NO LINE, NO MESS
I hate Sony just as much as most of you; but stop trying to pin the blame on them when they have absolutely NO REASON to shoulder any of the blame.
You can't stop people from paying other people to buy them PS3s. What are you going to do, kick all the Chinese out of the line? Granted, in Japan, that really wouldn't be an issue (for all you Japanophiles who are unaware or in denial, Japanese are EXTREMELY racist, particularly towards Chinese, among others), but you can't just go kicking people out of line when they've been there all night.
Further, the Japanese as a whole are very passive, and thus I'm not surprised that nothing was done about the cutting, but, come on. Once it started getting THAT out of hand, SOMEONE (if anything, the employees) should have done something.
As you can see, plenty of places to lay the blame, but I haven't mentioned Sony.
Why?
BECAUSE IT'S NOT THEIR FAULT.
I work for Sony, but this post is all mine and nothing to do with them.
/. account for many years longer than I've worked for Sony, but this story has prompted me to leave the site. It's just a little bit too much unreasoning, undirected hatred directed at me from people supposedly smart enough to know better.
Sony have taken a lot of flak lately, and it's probably been mostly justified. This, however, is the shittiest smear-job I've ever had the misfortune to read on this site. I won't be returning to the site after this post, at least once this story has run its course (so if there's any replies to this I'll answer)
How in the name of Zeus's butthole does Sony bear any responsibility whatsoever for the actions of people who aren't Sony employees? Did Sony direct these people to hire the homeless? Did Sony force anyone into doing anything, in any way? If a guy kills another guy so he can steal his PS3, will it be Sony's fault for making it? Of course not, all of these suggestions are absurd. So why attempt to shoehorn Sony into this, trying to heap more hate and blame on a company which already has so much you can fairly criticize it for?
Criticize us about rootkits, about batteries, about E3 presentations or too much hype, about perceived arrogance or copying Nintendo or making PS3 too expensive or not having enough of them, or about the quality of our hardware or software. You don't even have to make it constructive criticism, if you don't want to. But please, for the love of whatever, criticize us for those things we're at least partly responsible for! The actions of completely unrelated third parties aren't our bloody fault!
Anyway, enough from me. I've had a
Game dev and music blog
You're right. We should stop offering free sandwiches to the homeless.
Or free food at all.
And that charity thing. That just has to stop.
This is not a job, more like offering them a free sandwich.
Since they actually have to do something for the money I guess it is obvious why your statement is simply stupid?
While I agree that greed is not an "admirable" trait, I have to wonder who you and the GP think is being exploited? Certainly not the homeless person who got paid ~$170 for his troubles. The only one I think that could meet the qualifications are the people buying these consoles from the Japanese equivalent of ebay for outrageous sums of money; but if you can afford to spend thousands of dollars on ebayed consoles, then it's a bit of a stretch to say you're being exploited. The only ones being wronged here are the people who really wanted an PS3 for christmas but can't afford one now, but the only one to blame for that is Sony (and Microsoft) for their lame hype-inducing marketing tactics that are based on artificial scarcity. It's been pretty much common knowledge that the real PS3 launch will happen in Q1/2007.
They decided to go to launch with an insanely popular device - this popularity mostly of their own devising, see endless hype over the last months/years - with a woefully small number of units.
:)
So that they can get the "PS3s sell out in 2 hours" headlines.
So they get press coverage like this about people auctioning them.
So the PS3 pricetag doesn't look so bad compared to the $1000 or more it sells for on Ebay. Hell, it's "only" $500, must be a good deal, right?
I fully accept they may have had shortages of components or other manufacturing issues. However, the launch date and the amount of stock they had available was *entirely* under their control (As Europe has found out - they've pushed that back far enough). They could have pushed the launch back a month and had half a million units available to launch. But, they would have missed out on the media frenzy.
The deceitful activities going on by the businessmen mentioned in the article is a logical response to this sort of launch. By no means am I condoning this behaviour, but it's naive to think that Sony didn't reckon this would happen - they *wanted* it to happen. They don't care if Joe Gamer gets his machine, they care about it becoming an object of frenzied desire and generating newspaper column inches.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
the fact that socialism encourages laziness because there is little outside motivation.
Really? I was under the distinct impression that outside motivation often leads to laziness, corner-cutting, and generally reduced performance. You actually hit on a couple very important points in those few sentences, but you got your interpretation backwards.
With a small homogenous population that has a decent work ethic, socialism works fine. The problem is that there are immigrants who don't share the same values
It's not that those populations inherently have a decent work ethic and are thus able to make socialism work, nor does it have anything to do with the size or homogeneity of the population. It's just that societies without a system that stifles a sense of internal motivation produce people with a decent work ethic by default. On the other hand, immigrants who grew up with capitalism have learned to need outside motivation to be productive (read the link above) -- as you essentially state, they're the ones who lack the decent work ethic, not the ones native to socialism.
In other words, the problem is not that socialism doesn't give much outside motivation -- the problem is that capitalists tend to be lazy without outside motivation.
Imagine an analogous situation, where a parent gives their child candy whenever they finish their homework before supper, but of course doesn't allow their child candy under normal circumstances. As the research summarized in the above link suggests, the child becomes focussed on doing the homework as a means to an end -- a way to get candy. Then parent has to go on a business trip for a couple days, and asks a friend to watch the child, but forgets to mention the candy-homework deal. The first day, the child tests the boundaries, and asks for some candy; the friend gives the candy. So, the child doesn't do their homework, and merely pretends to work on it. Is the existence of this situation the fault of the friend for having given the candy without asking something in return, or is it the fault of the parent for teaching the child only to do homework for candy? Your post blames the friend, I blame the values taught by the parent.