Yes, this happens at every videogame launch since the advent of the portable videocamera, but this is the first launch of the YouTube era, and with that I think these system smashing attention hogs are blowing an opportunity at a career, a life, rather than a flash in the pan moment of glory. Stick with me here – You can get roughly $5000 per million YouTube hits right? This video is already at 640,000 views. You know what I do if I’m this guy, I get two or three people, maybe a NY, Chicago and LA system smasher to tier their smashing of systems at the midnight, then go directly home to upload. Between the three videos, you’ll hit a range of time zones, and can potentially hit a million views on each video.
So let’s just say you do get a million views on each video. Well, in a year like this, you can also get the Xbox One and destroy it in line next week. That’s $10k per person before taxes minimum, with about $1000 in costs for the systems after taxes.
Now, you could make each video themed for the area that they’re in, like put the Chicago system smasher in a Bears jacket or something, screaming about how the Ravens suck and they never should’ve signed Flacco to such a rich contract. If you’re enough of a whore to destroy a system as a means for living, then this is a worthy tactic. Milk it.
Let’s go a step further now, and maybe start destroying everything new that comes out. New Iphone, new 3DS everything, just break it. If you can make about $5000 per $1000 spent for a preorder or possible wait in line then why wouldn’t you? You could put yourself through college destroying sought-after electronics. You could put a down payment on a house. Hell, one broken PS4 and you could buy an entire block of inner-city Detroit.
Of course, then the copycats will come inevitably, and then more people will be destroying things and recording themselves destroying these things than people who would actually use them. The market will be watered down. Eventually, it would devolve just like Black Friday sales seeping into Thanksgiving and then into the weekend and on and on until everything is just one big sale. Soon enough, people would be destroying second shipments, no one would have any new technology and precious earth materials will be strewn about the sidewalks in front of Apple stores across the globe.
But everything is cyclical, and people would eventually go back to using new things instead of destroying them. It was good while it lasted though. The best of the system-smashing YouTube industrialists would go on to smashing bigger and better things, while teaching some young interns about free-thinking and imagination. The glass ceiling has been smashed with a new videogame console, and for a heartbeat, the gold rush was back, baby.
