PS3 Campers Removed From Burbank Best Buy
Mr. Andrews and I made a little road trip north today to check out the Best Buy PlayStation 3 line of insanity—you know, the line of dudes queueing up eleven days in advance? After hearing rumblings that the camping crowd had been dispersed, we had to see what was up.
Context & Ripple Effects
Sony's PlayStation 3 launch has produced the kind of queue this cycle was already primed for: a month earlier, Wii preorders sold out before most buyers could land one, establishing that both next-gen consoles would launch against demand well past supply. Against that backdrop, gamers at the Burbank Best Buy began camping [[a:entity|eleven days]] ahead of the launch date.
Kotaku's road trip to Burbank confirms the line's end: the campers were dispersed and removed, on Kotaku's own reporting and confirmed accounts from November 11, 2006. The story travelled narrowly — no syndicated pickups are on record — making this a local skirmish in what was shaping up as a national launch-week spectacle.
First-order effects
- The Burbank campers lose their eleven-day head start, and Best Buy demonstrates it will break up advance queues rather than let them stand until launch.
Second-order effects
- With line spots no longer holdable by waiting in person, position at launch becomes contested through whatever mechanism each retailer allows — pushing scarcity value toward scalpers and resellers rather than dedicated campers.
Third-order effects
- If retailers standardize on dispersing camps, launch-day allocation shifts from first-come queues toward store-controlled systems, and the console-launch camp itself becomes a contested ritual rather than an accepted one.
The trend: Console hardware launches in the 2006 cycle are outstripping supply so sharply that queuing behavior — and retailers' tolerance of it — is becoming part of the product story.