This morning I read this report from a queue outside of a Best Buy. I got curious about how the PlayStation 3 was selling on eBay. I was particularly interested because of this:
Of all thirty-two people that were going to get a PS3, only 3 were going to keep it to play, the rest were destined for EBAY!! Which in itself isn’t a bad proposition considering they were fetching about 3000 to 4000 dollars, and at one point one auction closed for 15,000 dollars.
I cruised on over to eBay, and looked at the 1000 most recently completed PS 3 sales. They were all closing within two hours of when I grabbed the data–12:30 PST on Saturday.
The 1000 most recent sales had an average price of US$1339.58 (that’s $1,536.16 in Canuck dollars). There were 22 sales over $3000, with the highest being $8000. Auctions averaged 12 bids, with the most bids being 69.
I made this little scatter graph of the current auctions:
I’ll be curious to do this again in a few days to see how the price has decreased with market saturation.
Of course, I’m unlikely to buy one of these badboys. I haven’t owned a console since my ColecoVision, so I doubt I’ll start now.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Don’t forget about this one Darren!! http://tinyurl.com/yxx5s6
Interesting article; thanks for posting it. How did you pull the completed sales data from eBay?
Krishen: You can just run an advanced search query. Then I just saved 5 pages of results (at 200 auctions per page) to my desktop, opened them in Dreamweaver, cut and pasted the final bid column into NotePad (the magic NotePad Filter) and then into an Excel document.
Ah. I knew about the advanced search query but didn’t know you could do that with DreamWeaver. Excellent.
I have grown more sympathetic to the PS3 sellers. The initial games range from okay to bad which shouldn’t be surprising given the time needed to get the hang of the new internal architecture. So unless you want a blu-ray player it makes sense to sell high, pocket your cash and wait for better supply. That applies to the games as much as the console itself.
My sister told me that a friend of hers, who lined up overnight outside EBGames, sold his PS3 for $1700. I’ve also heard stories of people managing to sell theirs for upwards of $3000 USD.
Just wanted to add that a quick scan of Vancouver Craigslist lists a PS3 for $4000 and dozens more upwards of $2000.
What I find the most assuming is that people are all excited over the PS3 for what it can fetch on eBay, while people who lined up for a Wii are excited over playing it. Granted, I’m a self-proclaimed Nintendo fanboy.
^sorry about the typo. It’s supposed to read: What I find the most interesting is that people are….
Heck – here it is two weeks after the last post, and I managed to land one from eBay for only $50 over selling price. Perhaps Michael is correct and the folks who paid top dollar for those early PS3’s are simply rich fools (does Paris Hilton have a PS3 now, and is it covered with swarovski crystals…)?
P.S. Just to clarify: I meant $50.00 over the ORIGINAL price of $600.00 (total of $650.00).