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NASDAQ.com has a press release online from eBay’s President and Chief Executive Meg Whitman, in which Whitman claims that 40,000 XBox 360 videogame consoles have been sold through the popular online auction site.
According to Microsoft, a total of 400,000 units have been brought into the US for sale, which means that one out of every ten systems purchased on launch day were later put up for sale by people looking to double, if not triple, their purchase price.
Today, of course, marked the release of Microsoft’s new XBox 360 videogame console. It also marked another explosive new item for online sales through eBay as thousands of people who stood in line for the $299 and $399 systems are now auctioning the units off for two to three times that amount.
At the store I was at this morning, a non-insignificant number of people were there solely due to the profit-making available anytime there’s a hot new product that combines large amounts of hype with very low amounts of retail availability.
Of course, the phenomenon also has a tendency to feed upon itself, as a good number of gamers who bought the system for themselves see the amounts of money being made through online auctions and decide to forgo their immediate pleasure for some quick cash made by selling their system.
No doubt we’ll continue to see this trend stretch through the holiday season as shoppers continue their push for every last gift option they can find.
Benjamin Heckendorn has a history of creating portable gaming devices out of older videogame consoles, such as handheld versions of the Nintendo NES and Atari 2600, but he’s very proud of his latest creation: a fully-functional Atari 800 XE Laptop.
Once again, mankind’s need to spend its creative talents on seemingly wasteful projects wins over all.
Popular Science has a great article up detailing toy-inventor Tim Kehoe’s 11-year quest to create disappearing colored bubbles.
Thanks to Kehoe’s vision, and the chemical dye expertise of Ram Sabnis, children everywhere will be able to buy bottles of bubble solution that will create floating spheres of a single color come this February.
Flickr user scrubbles has posted a small collection of videogame advertisements from 1982 that should bring back a memory or two for those of us who grew up in the age when gaming entertainment consisted mostly of vaguely shaped blobs shooting single pixel bullets at each other.