Want to sell a PS4 for big money on eBay? You probably can if you were smart enough to download a free copy of P.T. before it was removed from the PlayStation Store last week.
P.T., the "playable teaser" demo promoting a new Silent Hill game, was a surprise hit among horror game fans, with its masterfully creepy atmospherics and sound design, after it was released as a free download last year. But the demo was removed from the PSN store with little warning last Wednesday, alongside news that Konami was canceling the Silent Hills project.Any of the over one million PSN users who previously downloaded the game can still play it from their hard drives, but earlier this week, Sony removed the ability to redownload the title once deleted from the system. That means the only way to play the game now is to have a PS4 that already had it installed before the hammer came down. Those systems should be able to play the game offline well into the future, provided they were the "primary" PS4 for the associated account.
So how much is the opportunity to play this "lost" game worth to people? To find out, Ars looked at 40 successful eBay listings for used PS4 systems completed in the last few days, 20 that included the P.T. demo and 20 that didn't. We compared the sale price for those auctions to the new retail price for the system, plus any included games and accessories (we left out some auctions where it was unclear how many or which games were included).
Unsurprisingly, the listings for regular PS4 systems without P.T. sold for a median price 20 percent below the new MSRP, or about $81 less than new. That's to be expected for used hardware, often packed with games that have lost some value since the time that they were new releases.
Listings that included mention of included access to P.T., on the other hand, are an entirely different story. The 20 such auctions we looked at sold for a median of $520 above the new retail value of their contents, for a median markup of 96 percent.
Including P.T. access in an eBay listing for a PS4 isn't a guarantee of instant riches, though. There are plenty of listings that tried to sell P.T.-inclusive systems for inflated prices without any interest from buyers. There are also a few listings that actually sold for below retail price despite having access to the "rare" demo. Whoever won this $400 auction for a system with two games, two controllers, and P.T. seems to have gotten an excellent deal.
But examples of ridiculous price inflation are just as common. On the extreme high end, a system with P.T. and a few games sold for $1,800, or roughly $1,250 more than what the package would go for at retail. A few others saw markups over $1,000, just because they include a game that was free as recently as two weeks ago.
There are some indications that eBay might be trying to put an end to the P.T. resale gravy train. Kotaku noticed late yesterday that the vast majority of P.T. listings had been taken down over a matter of hours. eBay's rules are a bit unclear about whether selling hardware with preinstalled software is disallowed or merely discouraged, with different interpretations depending on whom you ask or what part of the site you read. In any case, as of this morning we were able to find dozens of active listings advertising the inclusion of P.T., so eBay doesn't seem to be thoroughly enforcing the policy.
Konami's actions regarding P.T. seem to have created one of the oddest gaming collectibles in history—a free demo that's inextricably tied to a set number of specific consoles (at least until and unless hackers figure out a way to extract and emulate it). As those consoles and hard drives start to fail, and as we get further out from the game's initial availability, the value of the game may actually increase alongside the urban legend of its hard-to-find scares.
Whatever Konami expected to happen in the wake of Silent Hills' cancellation, this probably wasn't part of the plan. Or was it? No, it probably wasn't.
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