PS3s Being Traded For Wiis
So, first people camp out in front of Best Buys for days at a time to get the PS3, and then they trade them for Nintendo Wiis. Seriously. Tony Conrad, CEO and Founder of Sphere, pointed this out to us and we had to see it to believe it.
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2006 launch season set this up: Opposable Thumbs struck out on Wii preorders back in October, and Kotaku documented campers being cleared out of a Burbank Best Buy ahead of the PlayStation 3's midnight launch in November. Scarcity was the defining condition on both sides of the aisle.
What is new now, per GigaGamez — a tip passed along by Sphere founder Tony Conrad — is the direction of the arbitrage: people who queued for days to secure a PS3 are turning around and trading those consoles for Wiis. When the scarcer, pricier machine becomes currency for acquiring the cheaper one, that says something about which console buyers actually want to keep.
First-order effects
- PS3 campers who bought at retail expecting a premium resale flip are finding the better trade is one-for-one into a Wii, undercutting their margin math.
- Nintendo gets an unplanned demand signal: even people holding Sony's new hardware would rather own a Wii.
Second-order effects
- Sony's launch strategy of tight supply plus a high price point feeds a secondary market where its console functions as a trading token rather than a kept product, weakening the optics of sell-through success.
- Best Buy and other retailers absorb repeat campers whose motive is arbitrage, not purchase, complicating how launch-day crowds translate into genuine sales.
Third-order effects
- If trading behavior persists through the holidays, the console race gets scored on which machine people want to own rather than which sells out first — a framing that favors Nintendo's price and novelty over Sony's spec sheet.
- Sustained Wii shortage into 2007 pushes retailers toward allocation mechanisms like rainchecks or lotteries, formalizing what camping lines did informally.
The trend: The 2006 holiday season marks the moment console competition pivots from launch-night scarcity theater to which machine consumers actually want to keep, with Nintendo's Wii converting pent-up preorder demand into sustained pull.