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The Decline of the PS3 Grey Market
Kotaku has a great piece up looking at trends over time in the PS3 grey market. Michael Fahey has been tracking the falling prices for Sony's new console, via sales on eBay and other markers. He called around to stores as well, getting a feel for the number of returns and current availability of the console. His conclusions: "As it turns out my gamer instincts and the threat of hordes of angry readers steered me clear of potential disaster. Aside from a couple brief spikes, there is no way I'd have been able to pull off the television, and I know damn well I would have waited for Christmas like so many others did, only to lose even more. The moral of this story? There's no such creature as a sure thing. The majority of eBay prospectors walked away from this experience with that lesson burned into the back of their brains. My suggestion for the future? If you want to gamble, go to Vegas. If you want to invest, try mutual funds. Leave the video game system buying to the gamers. We'll all be happier for it. "
You say "unjustly" as if scalping is a good thing.
You say "unjustly" as if scalping is a good thing.
I said "unjustly" in the sense that the PS3 listings that were being removed clearly met all of craigslist's rules.
But scalping is a good thing in that it makes it possible for people willing to pay more (rather than spend ages line) able to get one without getting line. If there were no scalpers, people would just hire placeholders. I don't think that would make anyone feel any better.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
scalping is a good thing in that it makes it possible for people willing to pay more (rather than spend ages line) able to get one without getting line.
The thing is, the fact that the market tanked so quickly means that the vast majority of the people in line WERE the scalpers. Scalpers manufactured the long lines and shortages they tried to profit from, only in this case, the only people to sell to were the other scalpers that were waiting in line to get one because there was no real shortage of units, only the demand created by the scalpers.
That would be socialism. This is capitalism, and wealth is seperate from rights.
Being an asshole in a self-policing community sure is a bitch, ain't it?
When people start modding you down because they're sick of your whining, are you going accuse them of censorship too?
First of all I never said you couldn't put together a resonable game machine for 3 times the cost of a PS3, just not a comparable one. Even the one you just mentioned has less media capacity, Slower bus speeds, less total processing cores, etc.
Interesting Idea using the Physics processor (which is basically a GPU dedicated to physics instead of graphics), but could you supply a list of games designed to use that physics processor?
Now what we need to do is take your cheap game rig (which looks like it will be around $1500 complete) hook it up to an HD TV and then in 5 years compare to quality of games that will run on it vs. the games that will run on the PS3. In 5 years modern games won't even run on the machine you are talking about building, yet PS3 games always will. Games will become more and more optimized for the PS3 hardware where as in the general purpose computer realm developers will expect more powerful machines to be purchased so no need to optimize.
30k? If you're going to brag about having 30k invested in various funds, I hope to god that you're under 20 years old.