Only way to combat scalpers would be to not buy from them. But people are impatient and selfish, that's why we can't have nice things.

Seriously, people in this thread diacussing ”price gouging”…

…this is a non issue for non essential goods, it’s a free market and as I stated earlier we are discussiong toys, video games is the epitome of non essential goods.


This entire thread would have validity if we talked about essential goods like medicine, food or housing. For essential goods and services scalping and price gouging are real problems that must be combated.

Welcome to first world problems.

This is a gaming site, so we will discuss gaming related issues. That's all the validity we need.

A the gaming related issue is gamers have no backbone.  Gamers cave to MTX, lootboxes, scalpers and pay for online programs...  

Nailed it

Agreed. Lack of backbone and the desire to look flashy in the eyes of other gamers are the root causes of the ills in this industry.

for a second I mistook you were talking about high quality graphics being the root of all ills in this industry =p

I'll get more informed and do my research next time. My bad I didn't know Amazon, WalMart, ect sold consoles at a loss.  /s   I get that the attached rate on a scalped game system is delayed.  There may even be a loss associated with it as someone who waits to buy at MSRP isn't subscribed to any services (assuming they aren't already subscribed to said services with a last gen console) and perhaps they buy 1 or 2 less games lifetime because they had to wait to have the system in their hands.  You seem to be making it out to be a complete loss. It is not.  It is mostly just a delay in attachment.

I work closely with logistics.  There is a reason the big three sell to Amazon and other e-commerce as well as all the brick and mortar stores rather than direct to consumer.  It is because it is much cheaper for them in both terms of money and resources. 

One: Physical shipment is cheaper and infinitely easier to track. 

It cost way less to ship 1000 consoles to 1 distribution center than to to ship 1000 consoles to 1000 individual addresses (almost an order of magnitude difference in shipping price)

Two: They do not have to employee nearly as many customer service people to deal with shipment issues. 

That is dealt with by whomever the manufacturer sells to.  Your package didn't arrive, your package was damaged? The manufacturer doesn't have to deal with that and eat more money, Amazon (or the like) has to decide if they want to. Guess who the end customer is pissed off at if things go wrong? Most likely not the manufacturer but whomever sold it to them will bear the brunt of their ill will.  This is a hard metric to track but believe me it is a fairly powerful factor.   

You are correct that revenue does not equate to profit for a manufacturer but the cost of logistics pretty much guarantees that the bulk of product flows through a middle man (at least at the scale the big three sell at). Middlemen don't really care about about attach rates and they see little to nothing in the way of services (one of the reasons Microsoft and so many others started targeting services years ago i.e. cut out the middle man)

I feel like someone already mentioned this, but I admittedly really liked the way Valve handled the Steam Deck. Granted, I do NOT like how it was shipped in its actual box and also labeled with what's inside, but I think Valve actually managed a method that MOSTLY worked. Sure, some people probably conveniently has more than one account that was active for over a month, and some really just purchased it to scalp, but for the most part the Steam Deck has NOT been plagued by the bot scalping issue because their method was actually planned out AND handled at the first party company level.

Soooo, this also means this is possible for the other three as well. Sadly, this would mean many retailers would suffer the lack of "traffic" in the wake of videogame console launches, but if the Steam Deck is managing it, albeit slower than people want, I think it's possible to create a core company-to-consumer logistic that reduces the ability for greedy people to capitalize on demand. AND, truth be told, cutting out retailers likely has some financial benefit, too, that may outweigh the increased cost of handling direct-to-customer logistics. In fact, both Nintendo and Microsoft technically have the infrastructure already in place. Nintendo will have to work on their servers for sure, though, as recent events have proven at such a small scale lol