These are the Days of Our Consoles

You may remember that we previously reported on Jane Wells from CNBC posting up an article about how her “videogame expert” son was trading in his Xbox 360 to buy a PS3 after being impressed by the Sony E3 Presentation.

Just a couple of months later it seems that her expert of a son feels like he made a mistake. It’s not like we really care too much about what one woman’s son is up to, but this whole thing has turned into quite a soap opera.

The plot thickens, after the jump.

In an interesting turn, it seems that her son now misses all of his friends on Xbox Live and has decided to trade his PS3 back in for another Xbox 360, even though while standing in line, his friend was complaining about his own 360 giving him issues now that it’s out of warranty.

The trade-in value for the PS3 was not enough to make up the amount necessary for a new Xbox 360, so to get it, the son made a bit of a plan. Check this out, you won’t believe what he did:

How did my son come up with the difference between the trade-in price and the new Xbox? He made $300 this weekend selling his decked-out World of Warcraft character on eBay.

$300 dollars for a WoW character on ebay? Is that even legal? Although I find this point quite intriguing, I will leave it for another day and just stick to the point here. Jane Wells goes on to list a couple of lessons that have been learned from this entire experience:

1- the gaming experience is more than a few games and cool graphics.

2- repeatedly doing trade-ins at Game Stop is a money losing proposition.

3- PC games like World of Warcraft can actually MAKE you money.

4- don’t talk to your mother about these things.

The moral of this story is actually pretty easy to figure out: Do whatever works for you.

This kid realised that the Xbox 360 was the best option for him, so he went back to it. He realised that it’s not necessarily about what the console offers in terms of technology, it depends on what brings you the most joy to your own life.

If all of your friends own PS3’s and play online every night you would be a bit of a fool to buy an Xbox 360 and play by yourself when you could be jamming some online games with your buddies.

Let’s hope that this is the last that we hear from Jane Wells and her son’s amazing console saga.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to go and create a World of Warcraft character, I’m going to be rich.

source: CNBC via Kotaku

Last Updated: September 30, 2008