The Sony PlayStation 3 went on sale across Canada for about three minutes this morning. People had been camping out for as much as three days for their chance to plunk down over $700.00. Many of them had no intention of ever unwrapping their game consoles; in radio interviews, people said the first thing they'd do when they got home was put their prize up for sale on eBay, where PS3s have been bid as high as $3990.95 as of this writing.
Yike.
I can't think of a single item in the whole wide world for which I would be willing to camp out three days...and that's if I got it for free. That people are willing to do it for a videogame system--something that offers them no tangible benefit--is simply beyond me.
I understand the profit motive. But I doubt most of the people lined up bothered to attempt a true accounting.
Let's try one together. Feel free to insert your own figures wherever you think I'm talking out of my ass.
Okay, so the lowest list price I've been able to find for a PS3 is $752.39, after tax. The high bid on eBay is $3990.95. (Incidentally, most of the other bids are a lot lower: one of them is $1403.53. That person did the smart thing and pre-ordered, saving him or herself a buttload of money, as we'll see below. But let's assume for the sake of moneymoneymoney!!! that we'll get that high bid. That means a net profit of $3238.56.
Or does it?
How much is your time worth? The average hourly wage of Canadians 15 years of age and over is $19.92. ( Aside: wow, am I underpaid.) That figure is undoubtedly skewed upwards by upper muckamuck types who probably aren't in line anyway, so let's call it fifteen bucks an hour. Two full shifts off work mean lost wages of $240.00 (gross, admittedly, but who doesn't think they're worth their gross salary?)
For that matter, who doesn't believe their time away from work is worth considerably more to them than their time at work? I think it fair to assign a value of $30 for each hour we're standing out here in the pouring rain (it's been raining a hell of a lot around here, lately). Again, feel free to contradict these numbers...and I'll in turn feel free to say you place an insanely low value on your time. I'm half-tempted to raise that number to $40 or even higher, but I'll leave it where it is.
$30.00 an hour times sixty hours (say) is $1800.00 plus your lost wages of $240.00 for a total of $2040.00.
Well, that certainly bites into the old profit margin, doesn't it?
(Incidentally, our preordering genius above is out none of that. He didn't miss work and spent a negligible amount of time in line, so his only expense is the game system itself--I believe at eBay it's the buyers who pay the shipping? I don't know for sure, I am not big on buying stuff from strangers sight unseen. Even so, he's only making a shade over $650: nothing to sneeze at, but neither is it a great sum of money, at least by my lights.)
And hey, folks! That game system you're willing to bid up into the stratosphere for today will retail for 50% less in eight months or so. Your PS2 was perfectly fine yesterday...is it really rendered worthless by the existence of its replacement?
No matter. Most of the people who are buying their PS3 to keep are simply looking for more realistic grue and gore in their gameplay. That may sound like an inflammatory statement, and maybe it is, but have you noticed video games lately? Aside from a few sports titles, the best sellers seem to specialize in cop-killing, gut-shooting, back-stabbing, and a soupcon of naked porn star. I know, I know, I'm out of touch. But to me games have always been for playing. You don't send your kid out to play and expect him to come home with a hooker on his arm and a rap sheet a mile long, do you?
I'll grant you that decent games exist, still, and even sell well: anything Sims for instance. In what I will readily concede is a matter of taste (and an admission of low intellect, surely), I will tell you a secret: I've never played those games, either, and likely never will, though my wife is a fan. Again, in my world, games are for playing: these things look more and more like operating systems. Any "game" that comes with a fifty-plus page manual looks too much like work to me.
Anyway, I simply can't believe the lengths people will go to in order to sit on their asses and kill things in high definition and stereo surround sound. But don't let me rain on your lineup.
3 comments:
Well, sometimes you just feel the need for a killing spree...
Seriously, I can't see the point of paying thousands for one of these things. I'd rather spend that on a kick-ass PC. Then I can play games, do work, enjoy the intraweb pipes, etc. Oh yeah, and I can update it a bit at a time rather than waiting years for the PS4,5,6....
I read a tale from the PS3 release in Japan earlier this week. It seems some businessmen were hiring the homeless and unemployed to stand in line for them to buy these things.
The funny thing is that if these people just waited 2 or 3 months, much like people did with the Xbox 360, they can get it easily and much cheaper. I think this is an example of our socities need for things now. People just can't wait for the fear that they might miss out on something. Plus, if your one of the first to get it, you'll be the envy of your block. People like that too.
Wombat, yeah, I feel the same way about computers vs. game machines. In my lifetime I've had an Atari 2600 and a PlayStation 1 and 2. The Atari could be defended--they didn't HAVE PCs back then. We bought the PS1, despite owning a perfectly good computer, largely out of a desire to play video games while ensconced comfily on our couch. We got rid of it because the kind of games we like to play were becoming increasingly hard to find. So then why did we buy the PS2? Naivete and a little of what Peter alludes to, the 'hey, wow, that's so cool!' factor. Unfortunately--and predictably, if I'd bothered to think about it--'our' kind of games rarely even show up any more. We sold our PS2 last year...fool me twice, shame on me. I have no plans to ever buy another console: I don't care if they come out with something indistinguishable from Real Life.
That said, Eva just recently got a Nintendo DS. She loves it. She loves the portability and even moreso loves that Nintendo, for whatever reason, has decided to market to people like us. Sure, you can buy all manner of bloody mayhem for the DS, but you can *also* buy scads of Mario Bros-type platform games that Sony and Microsoft dismiss out of hand for their lack of carnage.
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