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BMaker11 on 12 February 2014
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impertinence said:
BMaker11 said:
Dark_Feanor said:
DerNebel said:

Oh I do, don't worry. Tell me, have ebay prices reached retail prices yet?


I have a suspicion that scalpers are affecting the availabilit of the console more than I would considered it helthy.

There are too many Ebayers pricing the PS4 at 450 to 500 and some with games and PS+ bundles.

There isn´t any general market rush to get the console, prices are much lower than PS3, Wii and 360 reached at their respective launch February.

Bold #1: I don't think you understand how capitalism works. It's pretty self correcting. Even if a bunch of scalpers started hoarding the product and making them scarce in stores, when people go on eBay for example and see 10,000 PS4s on there, they're not gonna bid one up a whole bunch because there's other listings. If they can't find one in stores and on top of that, only 200 units are on ebay, then they'll bid them up because there's way less supply (and that people actually aren't scalping the product since there aren't a whole bunch being listed).

Bold #2 and yet it sells out pretty much immediately whenever stock is available. A product constantly selling out as soon as its available not indicating a "market rush to get the item" can only exist in Bizarro world.

You need to understand that demand can decline and still be very high. So, when someone says PS4 demand seems to be decreasing, that doesn't mean that the supply has cught up with the demand or that no one wnats a PS4 anymore. It just means that the number of people ready to buy the console right now at inflated cost is going down. This will reflect in the price in the second hand market (or the equilibrium price is going down if you will). Unless the PS4 doesn't follow the normal laws of supply and demand (hint: it does) a decreasing price in the secondhand market means either that supply is going up or demand is going down.

So, in your example of 10 000 scalpers. If they can't get the price they are looking for, that is because the demand is not strong enough to support the price with the given supply. Also, not sure why you frame that concept as capitalism as it's really just a fundamental function of a market economy. Of course, a free market is a central concept in capitalism but it's not like supply and demand doesn't affect the price in other types of economic systems as well.

I made a comment prior "But I guess his M.O. is that "they used to sell for $600 on eBay and now they're "only" selling for $520+. Demand has gone down!" even though it's still 30% higher than MSRP meaning demand is still really high". I didn't mean to imply that demand hasn't decreased somewhat, it was more to put his comment into perspective, because he's making it seem like prices are just falling rapidly in the secondhand market to bolster a point of "not as many people want PS4 anymore". When in actuality, the prices are higher than they were a few weeks ago.

And I'm pretty sure that example upholds my point. At that given supply, the price they want won't be supported because there's too many units available. There's no need to bid a PS4 up to 30% over MSRP when there's a bunch of different listings available. That's why I said if there's less available (200 units in my example), then the prices would go up (if they were also unavailable in stores).

And I only said "capitalism" because that's the economic model most associated with "supply and demand". It was the first thought that popped into my head.