141–150 of 254 posts
Thought of this when I was browsing AliExpress for Singles Day, today, and found this: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Video-Game-Projector-PGS-Con... Available cheap for another 8 hours, maybe something to tide them over?
Why doesn't Nintendo just raise their prices to where supply equals demand? They're leaving So much money on the table for scalpers. Or why not first release an expensive limited edition while they scale up production?
I've wondered why retailers don't do the following: set MSRP to $X, but charge $X + $Y, but donate $Y to charity, and advertise the fact. This is basically a variation of bundling, except people aren't too happy about that, either. It's easy to be emotional about greedy scalpers or greedy retailers (that forces me to buy $Y of crap), but most people don't think of greed and, say children dying of cancer, in the same train of thought.
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I can confirm that this is a thing... a bigger thing than one might think. I run an IaaS cloud provider and I know off the top of my head several customers of ours who each maintain a fleet of VMs to do this for a variety of products. Eg: Limited edition shoes, show tickets, etc. Some of our customers who do this keep the VMs running and some fire them up only when needed. Some use custom software and scripts and som…
How do you know that people are doing this with your VMs?
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I can confirm that this is a thing... a bigger thing than one might think. I run an IaaS cloud provider and I know off the top of my head several customers of ours who each maintain a fleet of VMs to do this for a variety of products. Eg: Limited edition shoes, show tickets, etc. Some of our customers who do this keep the VMs running and some fire them up only when needed. Some use custom software and scripts and som…
Reminds me of why I still prefer brick and mortar. Yes you may have to camp out, but it definitely has a better success rate than trying to compete against machines.
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$610 was the selling price.
Who in the world wants these so badly? I'm excited to get one... but it's not like I'm in a huge rush to play 30 year old games... If I really wanted to play them right now, I could download an emulator.
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> LOL at the idea that they can't just wait for them to manufacture more of them. I mean, the games have been out for nearly 30 years now, right? Assuming more are eventually manufactured, which many hope to be the case...in this instance. On a related personal note roughly 5 years ago, HP released a limited edition of their 15c RPN scientific calculator[1], which promptly sold out and found their way on eBay listing…
It seems HP deserves a bit of the blame in this situation as well. Hp could conceivably make more, and at a higher price if needed to cover increased cost, or license production to some other company willing to do so. That they don't/won't speaks to them having a reason to do so. My money would be on not cannibalizing sales from their other calculators (which, let's be honest, are pretty damn expensive). I'm less lik…
History tells us that HP made a very clear investment bringing the original 15c to market; it's their IP and their prerogative. I simply can't find reason to fault HP for their business decision, which was likely driven by overall product relevance than cannibalizing sales; 33s and 35s were the only other RPN scientific alternatives at the time, and they're both quite distinct from the 15c. In today's age of touchscreen smart phone proliferation, affordable licensed emulators[1][2] which scale to screen fill that void elegantly...unless you're a modern 20-something-ish Luddite like myself and still don't own a smartphone.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hp.hp15c15...
[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hewlett-packard-15c-scientif...
Nintendowned: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in (null) seconds
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Why are you blaming scalpers for people's woes with the 15c, rather than blaming HP? I see no problem with having different standards for necessities than for luxuries. We'd consider it morally reprehensible to deny food to a poor person, but few people have a problem denying yachts to a poor person.
There's a distinct difference between blaming scalpers for a general shortage of supply and holding them accountable for detestable profiteering behavior. The point of bringing up the 15c instance was to highlight the apparent assumption that manufacturer supply always trend consumer demand. A large portion of the user community knew in advance that the 15c would be limited release...but so did scalpers as hundreds o…
They've added a lot of value for people who really wanted the console to the extent that they were willing to simply pay $600 for it. Those people can now buy the console rather than having to dick around with the limited supply and hope they were lucky. Trade creates wealth, just as if they'd e.g. imported a product to somewhere where it's not normally sold.
> The food vs. yacht analogy appears to dismiss reality. In a zero-sum game, the unit cost of a yacht commands a ballpark 6-8 orders of magnitude delta over food. As a society, we indirectly deny poor people yachts on the merit of economic sensibility, not because it's a social luxury; simply replace yacht with a scaleable luxury like cell phone or computer. The notion of an alternative "affordable yacht" is an oxymoron and subjectively exclusive to the wealthy.
We're talking about a videogame console here - and not even a value-for-money one, it's been a gimmick from the start.
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Thanks for explaining. So what is the inferior product in this case ?
In the toy store case, it's whatever the parents settle for. Since, as you are implicitly observing, Nintendo itself doesn't have one available, I would agree with your implicit argument that this effect probably doesn't apply here. But it's still at least an interesting thing to learn about. It really recontextualized some things from my childhood, and forced me to reconsider the fact that sometimes, yeah, it really…