But you are CREATING the temporary market. Even if you are a minority, you are making the situation worse. And the fact of the matter is, if only people who wanted to actually play the system bought it, there would be no resell market.
There is a limited supply at launch, and all the greedy assholes who want to make a few bucks go and buy one just to sell. Thousands of people do this, which then deprives thousands of normal people from buying one in a normal manner. A normal guy who just wants to play a game gets stiffed because thousands of people wants to make a sleazy $100.
For example, in the Zelda 3DS thread there seems to be more people buying systems to sell than buying it to actually play it.
I mean you have people driving around town for hours preordering at multiple establishments just so that they can collect 4-5 systems and sell them. Some people camp out all night just to get a system to sell.
Scalpers are a leech on society, plain and simple. If nobody scalped, the world would undeniably be a better place. People would actually get the products they want at the intended price instead off of some sleaze on ebay. Scalpers are the ultimate middlemen, taking advantage of a situation instead of doing the decent thing. They contribute absolutely nothing to the world.
I preordered the PS4, and then later cancelled it a week or two ago. I am not so hard up for $100 that I have to resort to such scumbag methods.
You're missing the economics 101 point here.
The consumer, the buyer, is actually creating the market and demand. The resellers can do whatever they want, including not participating at all in the resellers market, but it's the people WHO WANT TO BUY IT, RIGHT MEOW! that have created the demand and some people have learned how to predict these temporary markets and figure, why not? Might as well capitalize.
If nobody resold, sure, you'd make a slightly happier little world that would last all of, eh.... five minutes.
Why? You take down such a market from ebay and craigslist. Guess what still happens?
"oh, hey fellow co-worker. You got a PS4? I promised little Timmy one, but I couldn't pre-order fast enough. How much to convince you to sell it to me?"
It doesn't work exactly like that, but the end point is there will ALWAYS be moments of "quantity: difficult to locate" for many products, and greedy, impatient people will ALWAYS want to have it right away, regardless of need, desires, common sense, etc.
These temporary markets exist for every major hype, low supply device. Right now, people are banking on the limited supply concept. I'm sure there may be one temporarily, but I don't expect there to be extreme difficulty locating PS4s a week or two after launch. Even then, that's long enough to coax out the "gimme now! here's twice the MSRP! It's mine!" types.
Furby's, Beany Baby's, iPhones, consoles, next hot holiday kid's item, etc. It's always been with us, and forever it shall be. When someone feels OK saying, "you know what, I just CANNOT wait a whole two weeks. My world will be ruined. Hey, I'll spend $800 on this $400 item, guaranteeing I get it now. Sure, sounds good! Deal!" then who is to blame the people willing to accept that money?
BTW, yes it seems like "a lot" of people do this, but in reality, it cannot be more than say, 5% of the launch volume. Maybe, just maybe, it's like 10-15%, yet I highly doubt that.
If that 5 or 10% of buyers decide to not buy it for purposes of resell, and that opens up 5-10% of potential units to be sold only to those who will use it, guess what? There's still plenty of people willing to pay whatever it takes to have one the moment they decide they want one, not a moment too late.
I'm not saying the whole concept is sparkling, squeaky clean in terms of morality, but it's hardly morally suspect and is perfect justified and OK in my books.
Except for the sellers who go out of their way to have as much product as possible for these events, the worst you can say about such a market is that it is enabling those who are willing to spend more than the MSRP for the product. Honestly, that's the worst thing I see about it - but they'd find a way to be dumb with their money anyway, and whether the temporary market is highly established or just word of mouth, "I'll accept your offer for this thing I own but didn't intend to sell", those people WILL find a way to spend that kind of money.
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