With some people camping out on Manhattan streets for as many as 72 hours to be one of the first people to own its new $600 PlayStation3 game console, Sony is publicizing the frenzy as a outpouring by “diehard fans” who want to play cutting-edge video games so badly they’ll sleep on the sidewalk.

“They want that bragging right to say, ‘hey, I was the very first person in New York to get a Sony PlayStation3,'” a Sony spokesman, David Karraker, said yesterday morning.

But make no mistake. Many of the hundreds of people waiting to spend days and nights on a growing line that snakes blocks beginning at Sony’s Midtown offices at Madison Avenue and 55th Street to be one of the 400 sold tonight at midnight say they are as much diehard entrepreneurs as diehard fans.

Mindful of a rumored shortage of PlayStation3 consoles — the sales target is 400,000, a Sony spokesman said — and exponentially increasing prices on the online auction site eBay, these slacker-cum-entrepreneurs are betting that they’ll be able to buy the long-awaited machine when they go on sale tonight then post them on the online auction site eBay beginning tomorrow and profit hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in the weeks before the Christmas shopping rush.

Sony officials say they don’t condone the online action sales and advise their customers to purchase them from authorized retailers.

But that’s not stopping even the people waiting for the midnight release — at a Midtown party that includes appearances by rapper Ludacris — from financially gaming the game systems.

Consider Angel Paredes from Washington Heights — the 31-year-old day trader and self-described hardcore gamer who has distinction of being the first person in the line. He’s been living since Monday night at the Sony building, where he’s used Sony’s public bathrooms most times and relieved himself at a nearby 24-hour deli during the late nights.

Mr. Paredes said there’s a chance he might keep the PlayStation3 once he buys it tonight, but he’s probably going to sell the device on eBay, cognizant of prices on eBay that he says have risen as high as $5,000.

And Queens twenty something Joseph Giordano, an aspiring law student, who was planning to spend almost 36 hours waiting with several of his childhood friends, has a profit-splitting plan to share the spoils with them if their eBay plans prove successful.

Adam Sessler, a videogame expert who hosts a TV show dedicated to videogames who is also following the streetside madness says he wouldn’t be surprised if entrepreneurs like Messrs. Paredes and Giordano are right.

“I bet there’s some crackpot who can probably get it up on eBay for…thousands,” Mr. Sessler said.

He said he saw similar but less entrepreneurial mania when Microsoft release its Xbox 360 game consoles.

Passersby seemed flummoxed by Mr. Paredes and the hundreds who have joined him in Midtown.

“A lot of people ask if I’m crazy,” Mr. Paredes said with a heap of cookie boxes and food wrappers that have held the food he’s been eating for the past 48 hours. “A lot of people are shocked.”

Sony may not be encouraging black market re-sales on eBay, but the Midtown encampment is not exactly a renegade Hooverville.

Most of the hundreds gathered near at Sony’s headquarters and the Circuit City and Best Buy stores that also plan selling PlayStation3 are resting comfortably in outdoor mesh folding chairs, huddled with their friends playing — what else? — hand-held PlayStations.

Sony itself is providing food and blankets for their street guests and even filed for and obtained an official government permit for “street activity” from City Hall expiring shortly after the party.

And true to a laissez-faire marketplace, people in the front of the line are trying to sell their spots for hundreds to people in the back.