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Did Sony purposely not release enough PS4's into the market?

Last month Sony released the Playstation 4.


As it stands today you cannot find a PS4 to buy anywhere in the world! They are all sold out. You can still buy them off ebay though... at TWICE the original cost.

So I started thinking, what the heck was going on. Did Sony do this on purpose? The old 'generate brand value through scarcity' tactic? For those who don't know, scarcity is one way of generating value in a brand.

For instance, perhaps you are offering a new email service. If you just fling the doors open for everyone to join, people get less excited about it. If you launch with only 500 accounts available, suddenly everyone wants an account.

Is that what Sony did here? I did some super quick number checking and it seems obvious to me that they did.

Here's the breakdown:

  • So far Sony has sold 2.1 million PS4's. So we know that they made 2.1 million of them for the launch of the product. 
  • We know there are 70 million PS3s that have been sold since their launch six years ago (so that's essentially their user base). 
  • We also know that Microsoft has sold around 70 million Xbox's (so that makes the user base for the entire console market around 140 million people). 
  • So of its own user base, Sony produced only enough PS4's to satisfy three per cent of its PS3 users. Of the market as a whole, it produced only enough PS4's to satisfy 1.5 per cent of the users.
Now folks have to remember, there has not been a new Playstation for the past six years! So the PS4 has been the most anticipated new gaming system in, well, the past six years. 

Combine this with the fact that the release came shortly before Christmas - meaning people would be looking to buy a PS4 as a presents - and it's almost impossible to believe that Sony 'accidentally' under served the market. 

I will say this. It is possible that perhaps they feared issues with the system and as such only wanted to release a couple million units so that should something go wrong with the system they wouldn't have to deal with a massive user base of upset users. 

But I don't buy that for one second. If the system wasn't ready for prime time, they could have delayed launch a month or so and still released for the Christmas shopping season.  

Nope, this seems like a clear example of a company creating scarcity in order to generate product demand and brand equity. 

And they've done so successfully. This Christmas parents and kids and people in general will be searching everywhere to buy a PS4 and they won't be able to (Sony has stated they won't be able to get any new units to market until after Christmas, at least in the UK, so I assume this holds true everywhere). 

The tactic seems to be working... and if the demand they've created holds strong into next year it will allow Sony to keep the price of the consoles high as consumers are willing to pay whatever the cost to finally get their hands on a PS4 (even long after a shortage of supply as been 'resolved').

Smart marketing Sony, very smart indeed.


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