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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I’m actually surprised how long prices stayed put despite a mismatch between supply and demand.

Any time there’s a vibrant scalping market, your prices are too low.

For this reason I always thought Sony and Nvidia should just auction off their products initially till the auction price is barely above the floor price/planned retail price. Just let the market do its thing and take the profit instead of giving it to scalpers and inconveniencing everyone in the process

I would have preferred that. I bought mine from a scalper with a third of the warranty gone before it was out of the box. Would have preferred to get it from Sony.

But instead of hating scalpers, then customers would hate Sony and Nvidia.

Sony could be smart, for example keep existing price as is, but also offering “premium” version for higher price but with delivery this week. This would kill scalpers.

Nintendo did this, the Switch was out of stock consistently, unless you bought it in a "bundle". A lot of the bundles were 12 months of the Online service, so basically easy profit.

People here saying the PS5 should have dropped in price, I just checked Amazon for the price of a new Nintendo Switch (standard model, not OLED), seems almost identical to what I paid for one on launch day. £250. This is now really old hardware that launched over 5 years ago (Mar 2017).

This "standard model" had a SoC refresh too. And as said elsewhere in the thread, it's now cheaper in USD (how components are priced) than it was when GBP was at 1.30+.

PS5s are relatively easy to buy in bundles; if you're lucky you'll have a game you wanted, except at list price instead of market price, but most of the time you'll have useless overpriced accessories and average games. In fact, Sony is encouraging the practice, and makes it harder for resellers to not do this.

I wonder if they actually would. It would be more obvious that prices are high because there is more demand than supply rather than because some third party is trying to make a profit of the shortage. If course some percentage of the population would likely start subscribing to some conspiracy theory about Sony keeping supply low on purpose...

I’ve thought the right thing to do would be to put up ~10% of production to auction to take revenue from scalpers.

Another alternative is that they sell them first Party (probably a non-option because storefronts would probably throw a fit). And instead of first come first serve, simply have a queue.

Queue or lottery would work. That's actually how Nike (used to?) sell limited edition sneakers. They either had a lottery or queue depending on demand or something.

Leaves money on the table though and still leaves room for scalpers.

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