No there wasn’t. :-) Check it again – 95% of the way-above-average listings were “purchased” by kids having fun. It’s usually some sort of a witty nickname, a brand new account and, of course, no feedback… I suppose they could still give it to the second highest bidder, unless it was a BuyItNow aution to begin with – in that case the sellers just got punished for their greed.

I don’t feel too well about profiteering like this, either, but
a) the people who buy them online can’t/don’t want to stand in line, so that’s a sort of a payment for all the time I spent outside. :-)
b) I constrained myself – I sold them with a free overnight shipping for $1,900 each, whereas other sellers went quite a lot higher on the night of the release. Basically, if it weren’t for me, my customers would end up paying more and probably waiting longer to receive their consoles. :^) The way I figured, I was making money on it either way, but I didn’t want to come off as too greedy, because a) it just wouldn’t be cool and b) I probably wouldn’t be able to sell if my prices were outrageous.
Case in point – there was a middle-aged couple that looked like, well, upper lower class. :-) They held the first two spots in line, meaning they got there about an hour before I did. But anyway – they waited for 38 hours, got their two PS3s, and put them on ebay with a BuyItNow price of $2,500 _and_ charged peple for shipping – a USPS shipping, mind you. They ended up not being able to sell their consoles and, well, losing quite a lot of potential income, since now the average price on ebay is about $1,100-1,200. :-/

could have made more profit than that – there was one that sold on ebay for 15k

Damn G, nice profit! I’m one of those 9-5 job + school people so there is no way in hell I would be able to pull that off.

Personally though, I would feel bad selling a $500 console for $2k. But then again if someone is willing to spend that much money to have it now, then I guess it’s their problem.

To the author – you seem to be mistaken. The poeple waiting in the line outside the store aren’t getting it for themselves – 80% of the time it’s for resale on ebay, for those lazy gamers or middle-classers with 9-to-5 jobs who can’t/don’t want to wait outside for themselves.
I waited in line for 37 hours – an evening, 2 nights, a full day and a morning – got 3 consoles (I paid my roommates to stay with me lol), and sold them on ebay for $6,000.
How is that for a slice of fried gold? ;)

Hehe… I need a second job to finance some new gaming hardware though.

I think that one of the things that draws people to the consoles is the fact that you only need to buy a new one every 2-3 years, and you are guaranteed that any game you buy from today, till the release date of next generation machine will run flawlessly on your hardware.

In contrast, 18 months (per Moore’s Law) after you buy the brand new top-of-the-line graphics card, there will be a game out there that will run really slow on it, under the max resolution/effects.

But then again, because of this hardware fluidity, we do get progressively better graphics all the time.

I still have an original Playstation 1, but never play it. I used to player Driver 2 on my PC a few years ago though, using an emulator – so much easier than waiting 5 mins for it to load on the PS1.

I think nVidia’s new G80 GPU and the new Intel Core 2 Quad will beat anything that the PS3 can offer… Have a look here: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1010840&postcount=1

Same here. My favorite genre is FPS which is basically unplayable on consoles.

I still own a PS1 that I bought back in the day. I must admit that there were several good games for it that I used to like:

Teken 2
Soul Edge
Final Fantasy titles
Metal Gear Solid
Resident Evil games

I think these are about it. It was fun, but I never got a PS2, or an Xbox or anything like that. There are much more interesting PC titles to choose from. I’m not planning to get any of the next gen consoles either.

LOL, love that bit about squirrels :D

I’ve never even thought about buying any console… I’ll stick to gaming on the PC forever :)