I've mentioned this before on the thread about how to counter scalpers, but with Starfield and many others having a decent success with early access, I'm wondering if hardware could do the same? Sell them at a premium price first, then gradually decrease to the retail price. That's essentially what supply and demand is. Scalpers are already doing that, and I think it's a good way to combat them. The people that wants it early are going to be willing to pay the price; as those are hardcore fans, collectors, tech lovers, rich people etc. Theoretically it should work out, but maybe it wouldn't psychologically. There wasn't that much backlash with software doing early access, so why not same for hardware?  I feel like this is a good idea if they make it clear that they are selling them at a premium price first, it's a win-win situation for both the consumer and company. This method could have really benefited the PS5 and Xbox Series. The best solution would obviously be to mass produce them, but I don't think that's realistically possible for consoles. So, what do you guys think? People are probably going to hate this idea, but logically speaking. Do you agree or disagree, and why?

That only really makes more profit for the company though. It doesn't do anything about scalping. Scalpers will still buy those higher priced consoles and try to re-sell them at a significant mark-up. They'll either make a big profit still, or end up with a bunch of consoles they can't sell, the exact same outcome that happens already.

If you actually want to do something about scalping then offer the first shipments, or maybe first 2/3, exclusively to people that have the most recorded hours on that family of consoles over the last year or something. So if you have 200k PS6s to sell send an email offer to the people who played PS5 the most over the last year and offer them the first option on them, if they say no go to the next people and so on.

Although personally I don't see scalping as an issue anyway. Let it happen. I'm patient so it doesn't affect me anyway. Trying to wean society away from the "must have shiny new thing right NOW!" mindset would probably be a good thing too.