Prices of Sold-Out Consoles Peak in Web Bidding Wars

VESTAL, N.Y. — “37 hours, 35 minutes and it was all worth it.”That was the Internet chat away message posted Friday night by SUNY-Binghamton fraternity brother Jon Wong. “It”referred to how long he lived down the road from his college campus at a Wal-Mart store last week where he had camped out to be among the first to buy Sony’s new videogame system.PlayStation 3, a high-definition game console available in $500 and $600 models, had become a bidding phenomenon at the online auction site eBay.com weeks before its official release last Thursday at midnight, and Mr. Wong is hoping to cash in.Many of the people who vied last week for the 400,000 PlayStation consoles said to be available bought them to resell on the Internet, too. The $500, 20-gigabyte model that Mr. Wong purchased is selling on eBay for a few hundred dollars more than he paid at Wal-Mart.Mr. Wong, whose weekend chat away message also boasted “what $500 can get me” linking to an eBay Web page where PlayStation had skyrocketed to almost $1,600, didn’t immediately post his PlayStation. He concedes he may have waited too long to post his device because the average price is now about half that. He said he is considering waiting until after Thanksgiving.Sony itself got competition this weekend from Nintendo, which released its Wii (pronounced “WEE”) system. Wii isn’t high definition like Sony’s new machine, though it converts a player’s own physical motion into ingame action. It costs $250, less than half the most popular PlayStation 3 model, which costs $600.At one eBay auction that ended Monday afternoon, the winning bid for a 20 gigabyte model was $810, and the site had more than 17,000 PlayStation 3 listings. EBay called it the site’s no. 1 most popular item and also featured Wii as its item of the day.The auction prices and hype over the latest technology from two big videogame makers releasing their latest systems during the same three-day period has sent parts of the country into a buying frenzy.Here in Vestal, less than 200 miles northwest of New York City, several stores near Wal-Mart along a main shopping strip also hosted early sales. Gamers who couldn’t wait indoors camped outside despite mudslides and a three-inch downpour, a torrential storm that triggered a county-wide emergency.At a Sony building in Midtown Manhattan, 400 people bought the system at a late-night launch party Thursday with rapper Ludacris and comedian Charlie Murphy. An additional 400 who had waited in line but been too far back in the line to qualify for the midnight sales bought the system when the store reopened early Friday morning.In California, Sony hired security guards to patrol a parking lot near a launch party to keep the first West Coast gamers buying PlayStations there from being robbed, Sony spokesman David Karraker said. And, according to press reports, gunfire broke out while gamers waited at a Putnam, Conn.,Wal-Mart.To meet the demand, Sony has begun airlifting PlayStation consoles into America, Mr. Karraker said.“We don’t support the resale of any of our products,” he said, adding, “What matters to us is that the person that gets the system at the end of the day is a gamer, and that’s the person we’re focused on.”More than five to ten times as many Wiis as PlayStations were available at launch, and Nintendo plans to ship four million by the end of the year, the Associated Press reported.Videogame makers and their entrepreneurial customers aren’t the only ones profiting: Being away from home for days can be challenging in a line without food and other sustenance. Mr. Wong’s friends brought him food, but where else did the college student and others get nourishment to survive living for 37 hours and 35 minutes in a store? In Wal-Mart’s food aisles, of course.

Prices of Sold-Out Consoles Peak in Web Bidding Wars

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