Much Ado About Everything

I was in Best Buy today to take advantage of Boxing Week sales (lots of Xbox360 games for $20 – which is pretty cheap by the way!) and I saw someone at the exchange desk with a PS3.  And that’s on top of yesterday event when while browsing around Best Buy website,  I went to PS3′s 60G page out of pure curiosity (I often go to Future Shop brick and mortar store just to browse, so I usually know prices by heart and can therefore spot a deal or a sale immediately) and found that they had PS3′s in stock online!  Which was strange since it was not announced anywhere – as one could witness by observing the movement of the stock; it took 15 minutes to sell only one of 65 they had in stock at that time.  Even several hours later there were plenty left; only in the morning they were finally gone.  I guess very few people were expecting them to be available, especially since it was not announced even on their website.  It was almost as if having PS3 in stock was “business as usual”.

Combined with Christmas Day sale in Future Shop and quite frequent stories from the US about PS3′s being in stock and people not caring, I would estimate that by mid-January we should be able to see PS3′s when we walk into stores.  Not everywhere and not all the time, just like with Xbox360 same time last year – but with a little legwork it should not be too hard to find one next month.

Of course, the real question is would you want to?  If I wasn’t a technology freak, I certainly wouldn’t get one.  And if I was asked, I would not recommend anyone to get one right now, unless they need a BluRay player.  There are two good games (Resistance and Ridge Racer) and a few sports games that are also good if you’re a fan of that genre (2k7 series in particular).  Also, if you own a PSP, then a PS3 can be quite useful in certain cases.  Otherwise, it’s an expensive piece of electronics that won’t get much use… yet.  And press reviews aren’t too positive either.  Probably because Sony is a much-hated company right now, plus the amount of hype we were all exposed to was just too much.  There’s a backlash, to be sure.  It is not even inconceivable that PS3 could fail.