You, and the media, perceive all these stores being sold out as implying that the product is super-popular and special. Someone who didn't plan to buy the product will see this scarcity and think that it's incredibly popular, and maybe want to jump on the bandwagon.
However, there's not necessarily a scarcity at the source - they could have a large number of units in Sony warehouses. Then, a week after they sold out on initial launch, and people are hearing stories from their friend iamdave and from the Times that the PSVR is incredibly popular and hard to find, they can ship those warehouse units to the stores and suddenly even more people can purchase a PSVR.
You, and the media, perceive all these stores being sold out as implying that the product is super-popular and special.
I can only speak for myself here, so take it however you want to, but going to four stores and all of them being sold out-honest to God my only thought was-oh okay, they're out, on to the next store.
Legitimately the "hype" factor for me was playing a space dogfighting game at a friend's house, falling in love with the experience (as I'm a longtime fan of the EVE Online series, and Valkyrie was made by the same production team) and deciding "Hey, I want one of these for myself".
So I somewhat get your point, but I'm not entirely sure I'm convinced enough of how true it is to agree with it. And even if that's what Sony did...it appears to be working for them. The appeal to PSVR is that it doesn't require the investment of some PC-oriented gaming rigs necessary to render games twice for a functioning VR experience; the PS4 is already a successful and popular platform; Sony rolled the dice and got lucky 7's with PSVR.
That assumes that consumers respond solely to availability signals. In reality people also talk to each other online a lot, so if a product was actually mediocre then artificial scarcity wouldn't provide that great of a boost to sales.
It could be the case. And if so, hey, if it's working to sell more, kudos to their PR department.
But as someone else posted, selling a million in a short time frame certainly seems like success. Whether there's artificial pent-up demand or not, they've sold quite a few considering the price of it all.
You, and the media, perceive all these stores being sold out as implying that the product is super-popular and special. Someone who didn't plan to buy the product will see this scarcity and think that it's incredibly popular, and maybe want to jump on the bandwagon.
However, there's not necessarily a scarcity at the source - they could have a large number of units in Sony warehouses. Then, a week after they sold out on initial launch, and people are hearing stories from their friend iamdave and from the Times that the PSVR is incredibly popular and hard to find, they can ship those warehouse units to the stores and suddenly even more people can purchase a PSVR.