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Gamers wait hours, days for PlayStation 3: Some will sell their consoles for hefty profit(The Dominion Post Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) They began lining up Tuesday. Some camped outside in the rain, some inside warm and dry. Some got free doughnuts. Others had to run a race. They all wanted one thing: a new PlayStation 3 video game console, which was offered in limited quantities at Wal-Mart and Best Buy this morning -- when the clock struck 12:00 a.m. at Wal-Mart, and 8 a.m. at Best Buy. And after all that effort, some of them weren't sure they'd keep the things. "I might sell it or keep it," said Matt Facemire, who came from Braxton County to wait in line at Best Buy on Thursday. "I haven't decided." Matt Allevato, also in line at Best Buy, said the PS3s have been selling on eBay for at least $1,500, close to three times the retail price of the least expensive package. An eBay search by Thursday afternoon showed systems for sale with bids ranging from $910 to $3,350. Most of the people in both lines said they thought the PS3 was a good system, but the opportunity to make a large profit on eBay was a greater lure. Allevato's brother, John, put it this way: "If [Matt] gets one, we'll probably keep one of them and sell the other." Sony is selling two different packages of the PS3: a $499 package with a 20-gigabyte hard drive, and a $599 package with a 60-gigabyte hard drive and more hardware options. PS3 video games sell at $59. The console has been hard to come by. Sony has promised 800,000 PS3s for its North American launch date today, with another 200,000 shipping by the end of the year. At its Nov. 11 launch in Japan, there were only a reported 80,000 consoles to go around. The PS3 is Sony's newest video game console and successor to the popular PlayStation 2. At midnight, the Wal-Mart Supercenter beside the University Town Centre planned to sell its six PS3s and issued six rain checks, said Brian Berger, who waited in the layaway section in the back of the store with 11 other people Thursday. Berger was there for a rain check. He said he was interested in keeping the console -- for its capability as a high-definition DVD player, not for a video game console. The Wal-Mart PS3 buyers were allowed to wait inside and nap. Chairs and blankets were set up. Berger watched a movie on his laptop computer. Empty boxes of doughnuts and Honey Buns were stacked here and there, and a few people played on portable game consoles or played an Xbox 360 or Gamecube console on a highdefinition TV provided by Wal-Mart. "We got the royal treatment," said Justin Robinson, who was camping out for a PS3. Wal-Mart provided amenities such as coffee, doughnuts, the Xbox 360 and the HDTV, said Scott Waldo, the store manager. "This is an event. It's exciting for us as a store to see people excited about new merchandise," Waldo said. Waldo said the first PS3 hopeful came to the store at 4 p.m. on Tuesday -- and stayed. As more trickled in, he said, the store employees started finding ways to make the campers more comfortable. At Best Buy, about 30 people waited outside in tents and lawn chairs, passing a football, reading and taking shelter from intermittent rain. A Best Buy advertisement promised 26 PS3s, said store managers. The Best Buy PS3s went to the fastest, not the first, said the people who camped out on the store corner. At 10 a.m. Thursday, a Best Buy manager made about 60 to 80 people stand on a line in the parking lot and sprint to the store wall, said Ben Allen, who sat in a lawn chair behind a row of tents. The first 26 people who touched the wall got the privilege of waiting another 22 hours to receive the consoles at 8 a.m. today, Allen said. Best Buy management would not respond to any questions about the line outside the store. One camper said he drove from Maryland because he heard the PS3s would go to the winners of a foot race, and he decided he could outrun the sort of people who spend a lot of time playing video games. The Morgantown Target, Gamestop, Electronics Boutique and Super Kmart stores were not running midnight or 8 a.m. promotions for the PS3's release. The trend of buying PS3s to resell them at a profit first became apparent at the console's Nov. 11 launch. The video game journalism Web site Kotaku.com reported that many of the first PS3 buyers were Chinese nationals who did not buy any games and left to resell the consoles on the Internet. Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, invited the very first PS3 owner onto a stage for an interview. The first PS3 owner, a 26-year-old Chinese man who did not answer any of Kutaragi's questions, left without buying any games and later sold the console for a profit, Kotaku.com reported. Copyright 2006 Financial Times Ltd. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] |