PS3 fetches more than a grand on eBay

Posted by T3 Online on Mon 13 Nov 2006

Friday's Japanese launch of the first PlayStation 3 consoles has already seen Asian sellers taking advantage of the shortage of available units.

Japanese shops reportedly sold out of all 80,000 units earmarked for the country on the first day.

Since then, PlayStation 3 consoles have been popping up on eBay.

In a bargain deal, one PS3 was sold in a fixed price Buy-it-Now auction on Ebay.co.uk for £450 plus £75 postage.

The PS3 had been available at a pre-order price of £550 in the UK, although European gamers will now have to wait until March to get their hands on the machine.

The standard price for Sony's next-generation console has been closer to £650 to £699 for other fixed-price lots on eBay.

However, those sellers may have missed out if the bids in the whopping £1,000+ auction is anything to go by.

With two and a half hours to go the highest bid was £1,120, with another unit currently at £875 with eight hours of bidding still remaining.

Sony had dropped the cost of the console in Japan by 20 per cent, putting the sale price at around £225.

Bidders looking to get their gaming thumbs on a PS3 early should be aware that the Blu-ray drives in the consoles are region-locked, which means older PS2 and PSOne games encoded for Europe won't play on them.