Four Days Before Christmas...Is PS3 Demand Already Dead?

At this time last year, if you were looking to buy an Xbox 360 as a holiday gift, you'd be looking at paying at least double the system's $400 price for a Premium Pack. The things were in hot demand. Yet this year, with the PS3 launch...the successor to the #1 game brand for the last 10 years, systems are...well, very easy to find. A quick look at the Craigslist listings in the Houston area and you see systems going for very little if ANY mark-up. One post reads that if no one calls to buy his 20GB at $550 (at cost, more or less) it's going back to the store. There are several 60GB systems going for as little as $650 -- again, at cost. So, what the hell happened? For all intents and purposes the PS3 should still be in hot demand. It's only four days before Christmas, you'd figure that people would certainly pay $25-50 above cost for the machine... no? Why I bring all this up is that a friend of mine bought a 60GB PS3 about three weeks ago at a Best Buy here in Houston, thinking he'd resell it on eBay and at least get enough profit out of it to buy a Wii. Fair enough. So tonight I asked him how it went, since I hadn't heard yet. He laughed and told me he still had the system. He put it up on eBay, the winning bid was $715 (barely above the $650 cost to him and not enough to get a Wii from the profit). The winner decided not to pay. Afterwards my friend listed it on Craigslist for $750 -- got NO e-mails. Instead he's just going to return the system to Best Buy and get his money back. I did consider buying it off of him, but then I thought...I really don't need a PS3 right now. As I've said before, Resistance is the only game I'm even halfway interested in (because it's Insomniac), and that alone is just not that compelling a reason to get one. Plus I'm still not done with Zelda, Gears of War, Rainbow Six Vegas or Phantasy Star Universe for the two new-gen consoles I already own. I wonder what this means for PS3. Clearly, if demand for it has died this quickly it can't be a good sign--can it? Granted I still haven't seen any PS3s in stores, but I haven't been looking all that hard either. Another slightly bad sign--in the latest EGM they've put together something very similar to the Xbox vs. GameCube feature Greg and I have been talking about on the podcast. Except it's PS3 vs. Wii. And the unanimous winner is the Wii. How are the PS3s selling near you?- CJ