Since the annoucement at GamesCom,there has been great Buzz about the PS3 Slim ans PS3 Slim pre-orders have just skyrocketed on charts across the world.With the PS3 Slim announcement,there was also a price cut for the existing PS3s and they have also been selling alot.

Best Buy just announced that the existing PS3s have been sold out.I know sales usually tend to rise after a pricecut for every console but the wait for the pricecut for the PS3 has been one of the longest.A huge number of people have been waiting for this moment as they want to get their hands to the succesor of the highest selling console of all-time.Along with the newly announced Slim.PS3 is causing alot of hype around it.Amazon has just predicted that there will be shortages of PS3 after the huge demand caused by the announcement at Gamescom.

Yeah, I bet there are some supply constraints. Scary thought. Hopefully they can keep up with demand.

maybe

I mean gamespot have sold out of their first shipment

slim it's new so it's likely
unless they can ramp up production, even if they start that now it doesn't look like possible

This is just the initial rush one would expect for a major price drop, compounded with the introduction of an all new SKU/re-packaging.

Sustained sales following the initial 3-4 week rush is what should be watched rather than the initial surge.

The only way I can conceivably see the PS3 "selling out" over the holidays, is if SCE has serious production issues with the new manufacturing process and is unable to deliver enough systems to meet or exceed their 13m projection for the year 2009.

However, I don't see this happening as the $299 price and Slim redesign have mostly likely been on the books for the 2009 estimates since well before those projections were made. In other words, SCE has been planning this for the better part of a year in all likelihood.

So if there is a "sell out," it would/should mean that SCE sold more than 13m consoles for the year which I just don't see happening.

At worst, some regions may see pinched supplies, which is far from an overall supply constraint due to demand exceeding output.

i hope not

If I were Sony, I would slightly under ship it initially so you get people more excited about it from stock shortages, but they have been making them since July... I think Sony will certainly have enough consoles

well both nintendo and microsoft called that supply contraint.

while it was only in america and some states.

Probably. There was a time in 2003-2004 (not exactly sure when), when PS2's were impossible to find. I searched everywhere, trying to replace my broken console. It may have been somewhere around the time that the PS2 Slim was released (again, I can't remember). History has a way of repeating itself.

Of course, during the holidays, I expect every console to be hard to find.

@ d21, well certainly in the UK there were massive shortages when ships got blocked in the Suez canal