Synthesis Studios

I don’t know why I always do this to myself, and I did it with the Wii — I just didn’t bother preordering it! Then, on launch morning, you drag your girlfriend out of bed to drive all around the Boston metro area looking to find a Target, or a Best Buy that may have one in stock, and, no surprise at all, you can’t find one.

What do you do in the mean time? Measure demand on eBay, of course. Through some quick Python hacking, over a 16 hour period I monitored all products named “Nintendo Wii” and watched them go — the graph is the results. The interesting things to note is that each line is a single item on eBay going for bid, and something happened to the Wii market between 7pm and 11pm on the 20th (items got expensive really quickly, and then the bid rapidly closed). Perhaps it’s because the supply/demand curves aren’t as nuts as those for the Play Station?

If you look closely, any Wiis placed on the market starting on the 21st hung around for longer — perhaps it’s because you can actually get Wiis? Hey, I managed to snag a Wii after standing on line at Toys ‘R Us for about 15 minutes on the 21st, and then decided to just stop the cron job monitoring eBay.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Synthesis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.