I’ve joined the next gen console crowd this week by buying a PS3. Actually that happened back on the ps3 release date where my girlfriend and I both were able to score ps3s. However within a week both of those systems were sold on Ebay for hefty profit. One went for $1800 the other for $2200. We were also able to score two Wii on the second ship day and both have sold on Ebay. One went for $400 the other for $560. I hate to brag, but I’ve got no problem taking advantage of other people’s instant gratification complexes.

So when I walked into Best Buy on Thursday and they had a big stack of PS3’s at the front of the store, and the 42″ 1080p TV I had my eye on was on sale….I decided to splurge and get a whole new entertainment system. All for less than the money made off the PS3s. Sony is billing their PS3 as a media center replacement for all hardware including your day to day computing needs. Well I’m going to hold them to it, and some of my future blogs will be about my quest for a PS3 centric media nirvana.

One other thing I’d like to mention. In two other posts I talked about how the whole Xbox live microtransaction idea would eventually be used to charge you more for less content. Here is an example of how that is now taking place. Example

Apparently some companies are putting the content on the disk when they sell it to you for $60. Then you have to buy a key off of them to unlock the content. This is a perfect example of how with Xbox live you’re not purchasing any new content that was created after the game shipped. Instead publishers and developers are slicing a little content off of the end product and selling it at a later date for more money. Now many say this is not Microsoft’s doing, but they are wrong. Look at how vista is shipping. It follows the exact same model. You buy a disk with all the features and then have to purchase keys to unlock them separately. Why use backhanded tactics like this?