I sort of agree with you, but at the same time disagree...
Until Viagra was heavily advertized most men would never admit that they ever had problems obtaining an erection even to their doctor, after the advertizements I'm certain that way more men feel comfortable talking about impotence with their doctors and finding out what treatment is available.
The problems I have with drug advertizing is that, like all marketing, they often prey on the fact that people are generally not satisfied with their life; they end up overpromising and underdelivering quick fixes to people's precieved problems. If you're feeling depressed because you're going bald propecia will probably not make your life better.
A friend of mine ended up working at futureshop after failing out of University. When he first got the job one of his 'perks' was that he got to buy anything from his department (videogames) at cost. Soon enough, he found out that with how small the mark-up on videogames was that the store made more money off of the chocolate bar rack at the front of the store than they did off of their videogame department.
Now, the reason most stores (either electronics or big-box stores) keep sections of videogames is that they bring tons of foot trafic into your store. Imagine how many people walk into Futureshop/Walmart to see if they have a Wii/PS3 in stock and end up buying a DVD/CD or snacks (all of which the store's margins are way larger on). I imagine that EBgames continues to stock new games/systems so that people will pick up a copy of a used game when they buy a new game.
The University of Calgary, in association with the friends of science, after seeing years of unaudited research being used in politics to support the conclusion that "man-made global warming will destroy the world" produced a series of videos that have been posted on youtube...
The Xbox 360 is a high quality game system at least on par with the PS3. The fact that the Japanese public won't buy it is basically proof in my eyes that they won't buy ANY American products. There's always some excuse about how the product isn't marketed right or built to their tastes, but the bottom line is they are biased against American products at the same time they are killing many of our industries.
How many Americans spend a lot of money buying Japaneese Music, Movies, or Books?
There are some, but they are a pretty small minority of the population. Do most American's ignore it because these Music, Movies and Books are poor quality? No! American culture is drastically different than Japaneese culture and they have completely different views on what makes good entertainment and what doesn't.
The XBox has never taken off largely because it lacks the type of games Japaneese gamers like...
The fact is that most "inovative" games break the standard rule in any creative pursuit... "Know your audience"
If you're trying to make a game that is different then you should probably look into who the demographic that will be interested in your game is and focus on making the game good for them.
My point wasn't that "The XBox 360 is doing great"... I just think that it is interesting that the sales for the systems (for 2007) are as follows...
Wii 447,500 Systems and 1,070,000 pieces of software PS3 144,250 Systems and 147,000 pieces of software 360 46,250 Systems and 100,250 pieces of software
Also for the past 2 weeks (according to vgcharts.org) the XBox 360 has sold more software than the PS3...
The obvious answer is no, Blue-Dragon was not what the XBox 360 needed in japan being that the XBox 360 is still the worst selling videogame system in the country...
At the same time it should be noted that there are more pieces of XBox 360 software being sold than PS3 software which implies the PS3 "aint doin so hot"...
The Electric Playground used to be a really good videogame centered show in the late 90's (when it was about the Playstation, Saturn, and N64) but I stopped watching it soon after the XBox launched; I noticed that suddenly they were heavily funded by Microsoft and for some unknown reason Microsoft could do no wrong and Nintendo couldn't do anything right for the hosts.
In my opinion what makes me disrespect most game journalists is that their opinions always find their way into the "news" and at the same time their opinions are for sale.
I would lay money that at E3 2009 all three companies (Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft) will be talking about their "upcomming" gaming systems which will be released in 2010/2011.
The only reason that the PS3 is a tough sale at this point is lack of games worth playing. It has one game that doesn't suck.
I would say that the PS3's biggest problems are that it is really expensive, has too few games and offers little benefit for the majority of people who don't have HDTVs; in 2008/2009 it will be a far more moderate price (still more expensive than the competition), it will have an average library of exclusive games (lower sales and a high cost of development will limit the number of exclusive games), and most people will have an HDTV but will the PS3 be able to recover?
Personally, I would say no... By the end of 2007 I would say the PS3 would be lucky to have sold between 8 and 10 Million units worldwide, by the end of 2008 I would be surprised if they had sold more than 20 Million units; I say this mainly because I don't see the PS3 being under $300 until early 2009 and most people are not going to spend that much money on a gaming system. In the same time frame the XBox 360 and Wii could be breaking 30 or 40 Million units sold, if either system is selling near the higher end of the prediction it would make sense for a lot of developers to produce an exclusive game for the Wii/XBox 360 than to port it to the PS3; exclusive games get better reviews, more press and tons of sales simply because they're exclusive (ask a reviewer how much email he gets after he gives a negative review to an exclusive game compared to a multiplatform game if you doubt me).
Basically, much like what happened in the previous generation, by the time the PS3 is ready to compete against the Wii and XBox 360 the competition is over.
Well, if you notice DVD empire has Blu-Ray winning the week by a wide margin, the month by a pretty narrow margin and losing the year; this would be quite likely if Blu-Ray ended up having a much better couple of weeks of releases than HD-DVD and not really suggestive of any larger trend.
Eproduct wars has far more statistics and many of the stats are not important for sales; most of the sales stats are pretty split and will change week to week.
The real problem with the parents post is he does the google trends incorrectly
Currently the data is only current up to the end of November 2006... December 2006 and January 2007 may have a greater search quantities for the Wii (as people played it) or any of the systems
I constantly see people mention that the console war is a "Marathon not a Sprint" which, from what I have seen, is completely wrong. The console war is a sprint to the point where developers simply are forced to heavily support your system; if you have enough of a lead at this point you tend to have support at the expense of other systems.
I don't know where the point is, and I don't know when any of the systems will hit it, but it is foolish to assume that the PS3 will have an easy time catching up in 2008/2009 simply because it has better graphics.
Nintendo has always suggested that original online content would be distributed through the Virtual Console; in fact they commented that it would allow games like "Tetris" to be viable (from a development perspective) again.
Actually playing games online? Who knows!
It has been confirmed that Pokemon Battle Revolution and Battalion Wars are both online games produced by Nintendo, and that the necessary libriaries have been made available to third party developers.
News/weather channels? 480p is all you get!
That doesn't seem to bother the people who are buying Wiis at a rate of 3 to 4 times that of the PS3.
I never knew there was someone in the world who didn't understand what an exaggeration is. Here is some help for you:
to magnify beyond the limits of truth; overstate; represent disproportionately: to exaggerate the difficulties of a situation.
Very few people actually bought HDTVs over the Christmas period (maybe 1%-2% of all households in North America bought a HDTV). I once had a gay friend/coworker who said that he couldn't believe that I knew no gay people in my life away from work because practically everyone he knew was gay; the author of this article probably feels that everyone owns a HDTV because tech savy, wealthy, early adopter types tend to hang out together (even though they represent a small portion of the population.
Last thing someone with a HDTV wants is 480p content.
Funny thing, most of the people I know with HDTVs don't mind 480p content because it is digital; it looks nice and clean on their expensive TVs. People who own HDTVs have a problem with analogue signals which the Wii doesn't require you to use.
The barren 2007 release schedule probably is playing a role too.
Metroid Prime 3, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Bros, Pokemon Battle Revolution, and Final Fantasy Christal Cronicles will all (likely) be good games; E3 and TGS are still yet to come with tons of developers now developing games for the Wii (after E3 2006 and the launch of the Wii no developer wants to miss out on the Wii).
Oh yeah, and next time you find a Wii on the shelf... buy it and sell it on eBay (they are often selling for more than the PS3)
People keep saying this and it makes me wonder if they're blind or they just haven't seen a properly configured HDTV setup in a good environment
I would say that people are more interested in the content that they're watching then the resolution it is being displayed in. When watching a movie, TV show or sporting event most people become so involved in what is going on that they don't see the difference between the 14 inch CRT tv that is in their kitchen or the 40 inch LCD 1080p HDTV that is in the living room. Unless there is a major graphical glitch in the image, there is (practically) no reason for the average person to care that much about the quality of the image that is being produced.
Q: When will Blu-ray players drop in price to become a mainstream product?
Stan Glasgow: If you go back to when DVDs came into play, it took about three years until they got into price points of $299 to $399. I suspect it's about the same thing here with Blu-ray. I think it's going to take up to three years to get down to those price points, possibly a little longer. But I would assume it's similar to DVD.
We have some control over [the cost of the] components. There are a lot of components in that product. Once you get volumes up, you get yields up, and you get efficiencies up; the prices go down on the components.
Essentially, Sony thinks a mainstream price for players is $300-$400 which is what HD-DVD players will be selling for by next christmas and Blu-Ray players (by their own guestimates) will not make their way to that price point until 2009/2010. Analysts have recently reduced their PS3 sales estimates to (approximately) 10 million units sold by 2008, of which only a fraction (probably 10%) will use these systems to actively play movies; basically the Blu-Ray camp hasn't won anything yet and HD-DVD could gain a lot of market share if they can sell a $300 player for Christmas 2007, $200 player for Christmas 2008 and $99 player for Christmas 2009.
The average consumer will only buy what they can actually pay for...
I don't know whether what he says is true or not, but I wouldn't be too surprised if on the initial shipments there were far more people waiting in line with the intention of selling the PS3 for huge profits. At launch everyone was anticipating that the PS3 was going to sell for thousands of dollars right up to (and well past) Christmas as it was supposed to be the hot holiday item and the low supply was supposed to make that much worse; we know that most people who tried to resell their PS3 did not get the massive profits they were dreaming of.
One thing which may add creditability to these claims is that the PS3's tie ratio through 2006 was ~1.25, the Wii's tie ratio was ~2.0 (3.0 if you included Wii sports) and in 2005 the XBox 360's was 4; accessory sales (from my understanding) were similarly skewed with far fewer accessories being sold for the PS3 as any other system. What this could imply is that fewer people were buying the PS3 with the intention of playing games on it.
Maybe it's the lack of vision that makes the DS so popular--the fact that it isn't a wannabe jack-of-all-trades like the PSP
I don't see anything about the DS that could be classified as a "lack of vision"... when it was released it was wildly different than anything that had come before it and it was Nintendo's unique approach of creating hardware that suits their idea of what software they want to produce that created the popular product they have today. They envisioned the demand for games like Brain Training, Nintendogs, Animal Crossing Wild World, and The New Super Mario Bros. (some of which use a greater subset of the features of the DS than others) and produced the hardware to meet this demand. They knew you didn't need the best LCD screen in the world to be popular and the added cost would drive customers away, thus they choose "grudingly inferior LCD screens".
The reason people choose a DS is because they want to play unique games which are appropriate for portable gaming; the PSP is far behind because far fewer people want a portable PS2 which has a MP3 player and proprietary movie format.
I don't know about Britain in particular but, from what I had read earlier, in Europe as a whole the DS has always sold more because of the lead it built from months without competition. Unfortunately there is no (good) tracking happening in Europe like there is in Japan (and to a lesser extent North America) because it makes it difficult to know what is really going on.
You do realize that no one believes anything that is posted anonymously without a link to a trusted source, don't you? You will have no influence on anyone and the Wii will still sell well inspite of anything you do; you will have no impact on anyone's purchasing habits and no one will buy a PS3 because of your baseless rumors.
It's cool that you like the PS3 and don't feel like a moron for spending $600 on a videogame system/movie player that has very few games or movies but you shouldn't lie about availability; in particular when you claim that the PS3 is sold out everywhere, or that the Wii is readily available, it is obvious that you're not being honest because (much like saying the sky is not blue) people are already aware of the truth.
Well, much like the PSP, Sony will probably not offer too much in the way of rebates, bundles or price drops (even if they're far behind in sales) because Sony does not attempt to compete on price.
Which is of course stupid. I don't refuse to use Excel, the best spreadsheet software around, just because Microsoft are a bunch of assholes. Learn to take a more mature attitude towards a company and its products, and you'll probably enjoy life a lot more.
One of the only ways to make a company accountable is to refuse to buy their products until they act in a way that you aprove of; if you disaprove of a companie's actions (say they use child labour on their clothing line) you can boycott their entire product line (including their food division) until they behave appropriately.
With some luck, the European launch will be a much smoother affair than the US one.
I think that is (pretty much) ensured. At the PS3 launch in Europe the supply should be greater (because of increased manufacturing capacity), and the number of scalpers should be dramatically lower (from reports that most people did not make $2,000 overnight and lots of people lost money after the North American Launch) so it should be far smoother.
Slashdot Mirror
I sort of agree with you, but at the same time disagree ...
Until Viagra was heavily advertized most men would never admit that they ever had problems obtaining an erection even to their doctor, after the advertizements I'm certain that way more men feel comfortable talking about impotence with their doctors and finding out what treatment is available.
The problems I have with drug advertizing is that, like all marketing, they often prey on the fact that people are generally not satisfied with their life; they end up overpromising and underdelivering quick fixes to people's precieved problems. If you're feeling depressed because you're going bald propecia will probably not make your life better.
A friend of mine ended up working at futureshop after failing out of University. When he first got the job one of his 'perks' was that he got to buy anything from his department (videogames) at cost. Soon enough, he found out that with how small the mark-up on videogames was that the store made more money off of the chocolate bar rack at the front of the store than they did off of their videogame department.
Now, the reason most stores (either electronics or big-box stores) keep sections of videogames is that they bring tons of foot trafic into your store. Imagine how many people walk into Futureshop/Walmart to see if they have a Wii/PS3 in stock and end up buying a DVD/CD or snacks (all of which the store's margins are way larger on). I imagine that EBgames continues to stock new games/systems so that people will pick up a copy of a used game when they buy a new game.
The University of Calgary, in association with the friends of science, after seeing years of unaudited research being used in politics to support the conclusion that "man-made global warming will destroy the world" produced a series of videos that have been posted on youtube ...
...
Climate Catastrophe: Cancelled
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
part 5
Now to get modded down for disagreeing with the majority
I'm betting I'll get over-rated today
The Xbox 360 is a high quality game system at least on par with the PS3. The fact that the Japanese public won't buy it is basically proof in my eyes that they won't buy ANY American products. There's always some excuse about how the product isn't marketed right or built to their tastes, but the bottom line is they are biased against American products at the same time they are killing many of our industries.
...
How many Americans spend a lot of money buying Japaneese Music, Movies, or Books?
There are some, but they are a pretty small minority of the population. Do most American's ignore it because these Music, Movies and Books are poor quality? No! American culture is drastically different than Japaneese culture and they have completely different views on what makes good entertainment and what doesn't.
The XBox has never taken off largely because it lacks the type of games Japaneese gamers like
One word ... Nintendogs
... "Know your audience"
The fact is that most "inovative" games break the standard rule in any creative pursuit
If you're trying to make a game that is different then you should probably look into who the demographic that will be interested in your game is and focus on making the game good for them.
My point wasn't that "The XBox 360 is doing great" ... I just think that it is interesting that the sales for the systems (for 2007) are as follows ...
...
Wii 447,500 Systems and 1,070,000 pieces of software
PS3 144,250 Systems and 147,000 pieces of software
360 46,250 Systems and 100,250 pieces of software
Also for the past 2 weeks (according to vgcharts.org) the XBox 360 has sold more software than the PS3
The obvious answer is no, Blue-Dragon was not what the XBox 360 needed in japan being that the XBox 360 is still the worst selling videogame system in the country ...
...
At the same time it should be noted that there are more pieces of XBox 360 software being sold than PS3 software which implies the PS3 "aint doin so hot"
The Electric Playground used to be a really good videogame centered show in the late 90's (when it was about the Playstation, Saturn, and N64) but I stopped watching it soon after the XBox launched; I noticed that suddenly they were heavily funded by Microsoft and for some unknown reason Microsoft could do no wrong and Nintendo couldn't do anything right for the hosts.
In my opinion what makes me disrespect most game journalists is that their opinions always find their way into the "news" and at the same time their opinions are for sale.
I would lay money that at E3 2009 all three companies (Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft) will be talking about their "upcomming" gaming systems which will be released in 2010/2011.
...
The only reason that the PS3 is a tough sale at this point is lack of games worth playing. It has one game that doesn't suck.
I would say that the PS3's biggest problems are that it is really expensive, has too few games and offers little benefit for the majority of people who don't have HDTVs; in 2008/2009 it will be a far more moderate price (still more expensive than the competition), it will have an average library of exclusive games (lower sales and a high cost of development will limit the number of exclusive games), and most people will have an HDTV but will the PS3 be able to recover?
Personally, I would say no
By the end of 2007 I would say the PS3 would be lucky to have sold between 8 and 10 Million units worldwide, by the end of 2008 I would be surprised if they had sold more than 20 Million units; I say this mainly because I don't see the PS3 being under $300 until early 2009 and most people are not going to spend that much money on a gaming system. In the same time frame the XBox 360 and Wii could be breaking 30 or 40 Million units sold, if either system is selling near the higher end of the prediction it would make sense for a lot of developers to produce an exclusive game for the Wii/XBox 360 than to port it to the PS3; exclusive games get better reviews, more press and tons of sales simply because they're exclusive (ask a reviewer how much email he gets after he gives a negative review to an exclusive game compared to a multiplatform game if you doubt me).
Basically, much like what happened in the previous generation, by the time the PS3 is ready to compete against the Wii and XBox 360 the competition is over.
Well, if you notice DVD empire has Blu-Ray winning the week by a wide margin, the month by a pretty narrow margin and losing the year; this would be quite likely if Blu-Ray ended up having a much better couple of weeks of releases than HD-DVD and not really suggestive of any larger trend.
...
Eproduct wars has far more statistics and many of the stats are not important for sales; most of the sales stats are pretty split and will change week to week.
The real problem with the parents post is he does the google trends incorrectly
region
city
Languages
Currently the data is only current up to the end of November 2006
December 2006 and January 2007 may have a greater search quantities for the Wii (as people played it) or any of the systems
I constantly see people mention that the console war is a "Marathon not a Sprint" which, from what I have seen, is completely wrong. The console war is a sprint to the point where developers simply are forced to heavily support your system; if you have enough of a lead at this point you tend to have support at the expense of other systems.
I don't know where the point is, and I don't know when any of the systems will hit it, but it is foolish to assume that the PS3 will have an easy time catching up in 2008/2009 simply because it has better graphics.
Original content? Who knows!
Nintendo has always suggested that original online content would be distributed through the Virtual Console; in fact they commented that it would allow games like "Tetris" to be viable (from a development perspective) again.
Actually playing games online? Who knows!
It has been confirmed that Pokemon Battle Revolution and Battalion Wars are both online games produced by Nintendo, and that the necessary libriaries have been made available to third party developers.
News/weather channels? 480p is all you get!
That doesn't seem to bother the people who are buying Wiis at a rate of 3 to 4 times that of the PS3.
Anonymous Coward Sony Fanboy Troll ...
... buy it and sell it on eBay (they are often selling for more than the PS3)
I never knew there was someone in the world who didn't understand what an exaggeration is. Here is some help for you:
to magnify beyond the limits of truth; overstate; represent disproportionately: to exaggerate the difficulties of a situation.
Very few people actually bought HDTVs over the Christmas period (maybe 1%-2% of all households in North America bought a HDTV). I once had a gay friend/coworker who said that he couldn't believe that I knew no gay people in my life away from work because practically everyone he knew was gay; the author of this article probably feels that everyone owns a HDTV because tech savy, wealthy, early adopter types tend to hang out together (even though they represent a small portion of the population.
Last thing someone with a HDTV wants is 480p content.
Funny thing, most of the people I know with HDTVs don't mind 480p content because it is digital; it looks nice and clean on their expensive TVs. People who own HDTVs have a problem with analogue signals which the Wii doesn't require you to use.
The barren 2007 release schedule probably is playing a role too.
Metroid Prime 3, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Bros, Pokemon Battle Revolution, and Final Fantasy Christal Cronicles will all (likely) be good games; E3 and TGS are still yet to come with tons of developers now developing games for the Wii (after E3 2006 and the launch of the Wii no developer wants to miss out on the Wii).
Oh yeah, and next time you find a Wii on the shelf
People keep saying this and it makes me wonder if they're blind or they just haven't seen a properly configured HDTV setup in a good environment
I would say that people are more interested in the content that they're watching then the resolution it is being displayed in. When watching a movie, TV show or sporting event most people become so involved in what is going on that they don't see the difference between the 14 inch CRT tv that is in their kitchen or the 40 inch LCD 1080p HDTV that is in the living room. Unless there is a major graphical glitch in the image, there is (practically) no reason for the average person to care that much about the quality of the image that is being produced.
Q: When will Blu-ray players drop in price to become a mainstream product?
...
Stan Glasgow: If you go back to when DVDs came into play, it took about three years until they got into price points of $299 to $399. I suspect it's about the same thing here with Blu-ray. I think it's going to take up to three years to get down to those price points, possibly a little longer. But I would assume it's similar to DVD.
We have some control over [the cost of the] components. There are a lot of components in that product. Once you get volumes up, you get yields up, and you get efficiencies up; the prices go down on the components.
*Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow
Link
Essentially, Sony thinks a mainstream price for players is $300-$400 which is what HD-DVD players will be selling for by next christmas and Blu-Ray players (by their own guestimates) will not make their way to that price point until 2009/2010. Analysts have recently reduced their PS3 sales estimates to (approximately) 10 million units sold by 2008, of which only a fraction (probably 10%) will use these systems to actively play movies; basically the Blu-Ray camp hasn't won anything yet and HD-DVD could gain a lot of market share if they can sell a $300 player for Christmas 2007, $200 player for Christmas 2008 and $99 player for Christmas 2009.
The average consumer will only buy what they can actually pay for
Anonymous Coward Sony Fanboy Troll ...
... Claimed that after November no one would buy a Wii, then it was after December ...
...
You've been posting this crap since the Wii launched
If you want people to take your stories seriously, create an account (they're free) and stop posting anonymously
I don't know whether what he says is true or not, but I wouldn't be too surprised if on the initial shipments there were far more people waiting in line with the intention of selling the PS3 for huge profits. At launch everyone was anticipating that the PS3 was going to sell for thousands of dollars right up to (and well past) Christmas as it was supposed to be the hot holiday item and the low supply was supposed to make that much worse; we know that most people who tried to resell their PS3 did not get the massive profits they were dreaming of.
One thing which may add creditability to these claims is that the PS3's tie ratio through 2006 was ~1.25, the Wii's tie ratio was ~2.0 (3.0 if you included Wii sports) and in 2005 the XBox 360's was 4; accessory sales (from my understanding) were similarly skewed with far fewer accessories being sold for the PS3 as any other system. What this could imply is that fewer people were buying the PS3 with the intention of playing games on it.
Maybe it's the lack of vision that makes the DS so popular--the fact that it isn't a wannabe jack-of-all-trades like the PSP
... when it was released it was wildly different than anything that had come before it and it was Nintendo's unique approach of creating hardware that suits their idea of what software they want to produce that created the popular product they have today. They envisioned the demand for games like Brain Training, Nintendogs, Animal Crossing Wild World, and The New Super Mario Bros. (some of which use a greater subset of the features of the DS than others) and produced the hardware to meet this demand. They knew you didn't need the best LCD screen in the world to be popular and the added cost would drive customers away, thus they choose "grudingly inferior LCD screens".
I don't see anything about the DS that could be classified as a "lack of vision"
The reason people choose a DS is because they want to play unique games which are appropriate for portable gaming; the PSP is far behind because far fewer people want a portable PS2 which has a MP3 player and proprietary movie format.
I don't know about Britain in particular but, from what I had read earlier, in Europe as a whole the DS has always sold more because of the lead it built from months without competition. Unfortunately there is no (good) tracking happening in Europe like there is in Japan (and to a lesser extent North America) because it makes it difficult to know what is really going on.
Anonymous Coward Sony Fanboy Troll ...
You do realize that no one believes anything that is posted anonymously without a link to a trusted source, don't you? You will have no influence on anyone and the Wii will still sell well inspite of anything you do; you will have no impact on anyone's purchasing habits and no one will buy a PS3 because of your baseless rumors.
It's cool that you like the PS3 and don't feel like a moron for spending $600 on a videogame system/movie player that has very few games or movies but you shouldn't lie about availability; in particular when you claim that the PS3 is sold out everywhere, or that the Wii is readily available, it is obvious that you're not being honest because (much like saying the sky is not blue) people are already aware of the truth.
Wow your imagination is amazing ...
Playstation 3 Supply Surpasses Demand
PS3 in Stock, Wii Sold Out says Analyst
PS3 to miss sales targets by 25% - analyst
And WiFi is included with the PS3...
Only on the $600 model
Well, much like the PSP, Sony will probably not offer too much in the way of rebates, bundles or price drops (even if they're far behind in sales) because Sony does not attempt to compete on price.
Which is of course stupid. I don't refuse to use Excel, the best spreadsheet software around, just because Microsoft are a bunch of assholes. Learn to take a more mature attitude towards a company and its products, and you'll probably enjoy life a lot more.
One of the only ways to make a company accountable is to refuse to buy their products until they act in a way that you aprove of; if you disaprove of a companie's actions (say they use child labour on their clothing line) you can boycott their entire product line (including their food division) until they behave appropriately.
With some luck, the European launch will be a much smoother affair than the US one.
I think that is (pretty much) ensured. At the PS3 launch in Europe the supply should be greater (because of increased manufacturing capacity), and the number of scalpers should be dramatically lower (from reports that most people did not make $2,000 overnight and lots of people lost money after the North American Launch) so it should be far smoother.