Thieves steal car — and coveted PlayStation 3

Kristin Kalning Games editor • E-mail

This Christmas, as my flight touched down in Houston, I heard that my house had been burglarized.

What did our Grinchy thieves steal? My husband’s car — and my PlayStation 3, on loan from Sony.

Now, I’m a geek married to another geek, so we’ve got plenty of gadgets lying about. And I have a well-documented shoe-and-handbag problem. But the thieves bypassed all of our myriad finery to nick just two things: A coveted game console and a 2000 Audi A4 with a broken heater. Weird.

Or is it?

Demand far outstripped supply
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past three months, you know that the demand for the newest game consoles, the PlayStation 3, and the Nintendo Wii, has far outstripped supply. And prospective buyers have gone to great lengths to get their mitts on these new systems — including breaking into someone’s house on Christmas Eve.

Stories of robberies and violence began almost as soon as stores opened on Nov. 17, the day of the PS3 launch. Console hopefuls were robbed as they waited in line, trampled as stores opened for business and attacked after nabbing the sought-after systems. Even presidential hopeful Sen. John Edwards admitted that one of his staff volunteers tried to use sway to nab one of the coveted consoles.

Why all the hullabaloo? Ask the fans who waited in line to see “Star Wars Episode III,” or those that queued up in front of Apple stores when OS X shipped.  If you’re a die-hard gamer or Sony fanatic, you can’t wait until March or April, when store shelves will be well-stocked with PlayStations. You want it now. You want it yesterday.

Pure profit?
But one needed only to look at the listings on eBay in the days following the launch to see the motivation of many PlayStation 3 wannabes: pure profit. The machines, which retailed for $500 and $600, were reselling for more than $2000 immediately after the launch.

That demand dropped off steeply in the weeks following, with prices on eBay plunging from an average $2,367 on Nov. 16 to $724 on December 21, according to Michael Fahey, who detailed the price fluctuations in a recent post on gaming blog Kotaku.

“The root cause of all the prospecting and violence, in my opinion, was Sony's decision to release a console when they knew full well supply was nowhere near demand,” says Fahey. “Americans stole, lied, cheated, and hurt each other for the promise of a big payoff, which in the end amounted to nothing.”

So, were the perps behind our theft hard-core gamers or just looking to sell the console for a profit? Hard to tell. But even if they couldn’t distinguish a PlayStation from a Game Boy, the hype surrounding the hard-to-get machine certainly raised its profile. The thieves bypassed our year-old Xbox 360 and our ages-old Nintendo GameCube in favor of the sleek black PS3. 

National frenzy
“There’s obviously been a national frenzy [over the game systems,]” says Sgt. Joel Tranter of the Phoenix police department. “And thieves know what’s valuable and what’s not.”

Most police departments I polled don’t segment stolen items by type, so it’s tough to know if our burglary was part of a nationwide trend, or just bad luck on Christmas Eve. But thefts of consumer electronics items like laptops, MP3 players and game consoles are most certainly on the rise.

“Thieves take items they can easily carry away,” says Enrique Garcia, press information officer for the San Jose police department in San Jose, Calif. “But this happens throughout the year, not just at Christmas.”

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