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People should hate scalpers. They are leaches who use excess time and information to squat on something others want. They make nothing, add nothing, provide nothing.

It’s mostly poor kids who make 20-30k a year trying to get some extra pocket change. Even if you are doing it at scale you probably won’t make more than 100k

One, citation needed.

Two, I don't care if they're starving children in Africa. They're leeches creating, extending, and profiteering off shortages.

And it's not just PS5/Xbox X - it's happening with OLED Switches, something which wasn't forecast to have shortages in the first place.

It's how I paid for my Christmas gifts when I was in High School. Wait in lines for xboxes, furbies, whatever the hot toy was that year.

Think of the guys who spent tens of thousands of dollars on generators, rented a truck and drove down to New Orleans after katrina. They got locked up (and their generators impounded) because they were "price gouging". As if the tens of thousands of capital and the dangerous work of brining the generators to market wasn't worth the 5x markup. The generators weren't doing anyone any good sitting in Kansas.

Surely you're not greedy, right? You work for the good of everyone and you benefit in no way, right? It isn't the benevolence of the baker that puts bread on your table. It isn't the benevolence of the brewer that puts beer in your fridge. It isn't the benevolence of the butcher that puts the bacon in the oven. Prices are signals, and they work.

Certainly, you can see the difference between a butcher and someone who buys out the butcher to sell the bacon for 5x their investment, just because they want that money in their pockets?

> They got locked up

Good. They were taking advantage of the poor and needy who are living without their homes and public utilities. They were taking advantage of a crisis to line their fucking pockets. If they really wanted those generators from Kansas to be useful, they could have moved them and charged their costs. There's no need to extravagantly line their pockets - to be greedy fuckers - to provide a useful service to a disaster area.

TL;DR: I think that the scalper's "my pocketbook first, no matter the cost to you" brand of morality to be morally bankrupt, and utterly deserving of society's scorn (and more).

> It isn't the benevolence of the baker that puts bread on your table.

Farmers are often very proud of the fact they're feeding people, and I'm sure the same is true of bakers.

Given how often people seem to donate crops and food, I doubt you'd much of support for charging the desperate high prices for food, even from the people who stand to benefit.

The generator guy simply got robbed by the guys with guns in the state. He was doing a public service my moving essential equipment to a place it was needed and was charging a fee.

> I don't care if they're starving children in Africa. They're leeches creating, extending, and profiteering off shortages.

Calm down dude, it's just videogames. None of this matters.

> None of this matters.

Right, because scalping totally only ever happens with videogames, and never with generators, toilet paper, and water.

There are legal protections on products like generators and water.

Scalpers on consumer goods are just providing a market correction; rather than having the goods go to the lucky few to find the product on store shelves the product goes to the highest bidder which in theory who deriving the most benefit. The alternative is the only way to get a GPU/Console would be to wait in line the longest which would make GPUs unavailable for people who need them for work, research, etc.

It's not like scalpers have a monopoly on the GPUs, they are competing with each other while incurring their own marginal costs so it is unlikely that the scalpers would be capable of raising the price above the 'real' market price.

The GPU market is the prefect example since all the evidence suggests that the GPU AIBs and distributors are inflating the prices far before scalpers buy the cards. You can tell this is the case because the only models widely available are the higher-tier SKUs of each card type.

You can argue that a market in which there are scalpers is ripe for corruption, collusion, etc. but those are separate issues.

Yep Zotac cards come pre scalped by the oem

You have no idea what you're talking about. Maybe stop for a second and think before spamming multiple hate posts in the thread.

Scalpers provide the service of price discovery. If there exist scalpers, it is because something was mispriced in the first place.

Most scalping happens on scarce luxury goods that are not necessary in any way shape or form for your survival, existence or even happiness.

No one owes you a 3090 GTX or a front-row concert ticket, but if you really want one, then you're going to pay a bit of extra money for the convenience of being able to get a very scarce good on short notice. Don't try to project your own morality on this transaction.

This is the concept of "economic rent"

It was really difficult to understand the concept in my mind, and the myriad places it applies, but it has helped me understand a lot of stuff.

Also an interesting fact: When Adam Smith said "free markets" what he meant was "free of economic rent". That is maybe as radical an idea now in our era of health insurance and credit based finance as it was in Smith's day of the "place men" of Britain.

Scalpers exist when a company chooses to ignore the supply demand curve. The value of a Ps5 is much above the asking price, which is easily seen in the price scalpers are asking. This is similar to video cards as well right now, or tickets to many sporting events.

Scalpers essentially make it always possible for a customer to buy a product if they want it enough ($$$). Otherwise, it's more of a lottery system, if the product is not priced well enough.

An MSRP of $1300 would generate fewer recurring news stories than "PS5 out of stock everywhere, people bidding $1300 on Ebay".

Much better for the company to engineer a situation where it looks like the product is flying off the shelves. That signals to on-the-fence customers that this product is especially worth having.

Let's be honest, the PS5 is not a product that needs this kind of hype. The number of people who are going to buy one anyway greatly outnumber production supplies for the first few years anyway. People were going to camp out around the block to get one, regardless of spending $600, $1000, or probably even $2500. The "on the fence" long-tail customers come several years later will be more swayed by desirably content than some crazy even that happened many moons ago.

Going for recurring news segments is merely corporate vanity in this case. What your talking about is better suited to luxury clothing brands, or things that are fashionable for a minute, then everyone moves on to the next big thing.

Plus, the scalpers are really starting to piss people off. It was acceptable in the first month or so because people thought it would die down soon. But we are a year out from launch, and it's still happening. People are starting to look at alternatives to gaming consoles because, while they'd happily pay $1000+ for a console, they aren't going to buy from a scalper on principal.

The only alternative is cloud gaming because graphics cards are way harder to get than consoles

I was just at the Microcenter this weekend and they had a few RTX 30x0s on the shelves and several of AMD RX6ks. Plus, tons (a dozne or so)of older models. Granted, you had to be willing to pay for them, because they only stock the Zotac brand RTX cards.

They also had plenty of gaming laptops. In fact, the gaming laptops were basically all they had in stock.

That demonstrates that market adjustments work to keep inventory in stock. Some people are willing to wait all morning in line to snag a $700 RTX 3070, but balk at the idea of paying $1100 for a Zotac RTX 3070. Which allows Joe Consumer to walk right into a store and get what they want.

Why not just pay a scalper off stock or eBay at that point? Do you really care who pockets the difference?

I completely disagree, the PS3 launch price did serious long term damage to its prospects against the 360. Later price drops helped, but by that time the 360 was too far ahead in the land grab.

You raise some really good points. Perhaps Sony is also afraid that if the other makers don't follow suit, that they'll lose market share to the others due to unsynched releases. Car makers are expected to release new models yearly, but not so much for game systems. So if surge pricing is over with a nintendo switch but just starting with PS5, maybe the switch takes over. Perhaps people would rather compete to get a limited supply than to pay more?

It could be that they are afraid of a high MSRP scaring away customers. But this isn't 1993. There was clearly a market for $1000+ priced PS5s that would have lasted at least a year. The PS4, PS4 Pro, and PS5 offer a good, stratified product lineup to justify the higher prices to consumers.

Plus, the Switch never really competed with the XB or PS5. Kind of like with a PC, Switch ownership compliments XB or PS5 ownership pretty well. People buy the Switch for the Nintendo games, and maybe tolerate a shitty port of a game because they can play on the go. But most people seem happy to own both.

I kinda like what Valve did with Steam Deck. One per customer(or account) and small pre-payment with limit of the age of account on initial launch. Ofc, the mad rush and low supplies still weren't great. But at least there is some chance that they end up in hands of real customers.

Not that there isn't plenty of people with multiple accounts that possibly look decent in most metrics. (Myself included)

Lots of folks were scalping these too

What do you do after the shortage ends? 1300$ isn't a good price for long term, 400$ is. If you try to make a 70% price drop close to relase, you just screw over your next console launch. Sony doesn't even profit from console sales, the actual juice is from PSN and cuts from game sales.

I predict Sony will just cut their supply to Best Buy. They want their consoles to be cheap for a reason.

They drop the price and/or offer bundles. They can even release a "preliminary price roadmap" for customers, stating explicitly that the price will drop over time, and let them decide when is a good time for them to buy.

Plus, the PS4 Pros still exist. If a kid looks at a price roadmap and sees they can't afford a PS5 until 2023, but can afford a PS4 Pro now, and sees that they can get free PS5 upgrades on all games they buy for the PS4 Pro, they might pull the trigger on that.

As it stands now, people were thoroughly uninterested in the PS4 Pro, until it became clear that they weren't getting a PS5 anytime soon, so then prices on those spiked as well.

Every other consumer electronic has a stratified product lineup, where the top of the line model has a crazy high price, which drops quickly. Sony is just behind the times in this respect.

What about the studios who spent 5+ years and millions of dollars in development to release their game to a particular console? How will they recuperate their costs if no one is buying their games in the critical 6-month post-release window because the console is too expensive? Fewer early customers means fewer dollars to reinvest in the next Playstation game and that's fewer dollars spent by Sony for the next hardware release. It's a vicious cycle that's going to hit Sony right in the pocketbook in the short- and long-term.

Third party studios aren't going to develop for a console with high a development cost AND reduced ROI.The result of your proposal is stagnating hardware and low game sales. These days, developers could just build games for the Xbox and easily port it to Windows and vice versa. Two markets for the price of a Windows server farm.