[littlecranky67]

Very unpopular opinion: Scalping is the fair market price discovery - it is basically a requirement in free trade societies. Now, Valve has no interest in screwing up their users because of the AI hardware craze. But this is what happens if you reject free trading: You have to signup for a lottery to get something scarce/in high demand. No matter how hard you work in your daily life, the only way to get the scarce resource is being lucky in a lottery. Which raises the question, why would you work hard to create value for others in a system like that?

[Fargren]

> Which raises the question, why would you work hard to create value for others in a system like that?

Because creating things for others is a fulfilling way to live your life, and creates a richer society.

Valve does not want to maximize revenue from the controller sales. If they did, they would auction the controllers. That would get rid of scalpers, and ensure each controllers is sold at the highest number the market would bear. They are not doing that, which implies revenue-maximization is not their goal.

My intuition is that they are trying to improve the health of the gaming ecosystem because that benefits their core business which is selling games. For them it's important that some people who are more price-sensitive get this controller. Because those customers buy different games than those who would pay top dollar, and those games are important to Valve. And because they promote gaming in ways that don't bring revenue directly but do create harder to measure value.

[nkrisc]

No, it’s just a case of the rich getting richer. Use your money to buy out the entire stock and then resell it for double the price. What value was added? It’s just the scalper taking the savings the seller intended to pass on to the consumer for themselves.

It adds nothing and makes the world worse for everyone else. It’s anti-social behavior.

[freedomben]

You can't ignore the laws of economics and expect them to go away, any more than you can ignore the law of gravity and expect not to die when you make a high impact landing without equipment.

Just because you don't want them to be true, does not make them true, and you can't just dismiss them. In any system with scarce resources, some rationing mechanism must be at play. If it isn't price paid, it is something else like a lottery, who you're politically connected to, etc.

Sibling comment has it right. Valve is making a choice here. I think it's a better choice than raising the price personally. I detest scalpers with a burning hatred, but the way to combat that is to understand the economics behind why and how it works, not to ignore it and dismiss it with "the rich get richer"

[Forgeties79]

These forces are reality, we all acknowledge this, but I think most of us object to their assertion it is good and drives towards FMV rather than distorts it.

Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn’t mean they don’t understand basic economics. You should be a little more charitable in your discussions.

[bentley]

I wouldn’t call scalping “good” necessarily, but in the case of the Steam Controller, I’ve seen an awful lot of people incensed about scalping whose commentary overpowers more interesting discussion in Steam Controller communities. I’m not convinced scalping is a huge problem for the Steam Controller, a few dozen silly‐priced Ebay auctions notwithstanding. Valve’s current solutions seem helpful to me, but I see outrage threads where people advocate DRM‐locking controllers to accounts to prevent resale, or enforcing price caps on sales, both of which are far worse than allowing scalping to exist, and does suggest some lack of economic understanding (since both “solutions” would simply make Steam Controllers harder to come by).

[freedomben]

You're right I probably should be more charitable, but I don't see any other way to read GP other than them denying basic economics. The comment that they were replying to did not say it was a good thing and they liked it. Sure it may have been implicit to some, but if GP was objecting to that, they should have used something other than the word no.

If they were responding to this part:

> why would you work hard to create value for others in a system like that?

Then their answer of no makes no sense, so I don't see a way to be much more charitable

[nkrisc]

My point is that laws of economics are unrelated to what’s good for society, and throwing out hands up and saying, “well that’s hour economics work, nothing we can do” is absurd. I don’t know what the solution is, but there doesn’t have to be an economic solution, we can find a legal solution or social solution.

[robotnikman]

This right here. Scalpers are offering nothing, they are parasites in a functional capitalist system.

[maccard]

Scalping still exists. They're readily available sealed in box for 2-2.5x retail.

For someone who will purchase at a scalped price, this has no impact. For a scalper, it reduces the likelihood of a guaranteed return. For someone who will purchase at an RRP it gives them an actual timeframe for delivery and lets them make an educated decision on whether they want to purchase for £85 in 6 months, or pay £200 on ebay and have it tomorrow.

Scalping removes one critically important part of FMV - the lack of duress. It's not FMV it's effectively a distress value.

[andrewaylett]

That may well not be scalping per-se, if scalping is the bulk purchase and resale.

I find it a lot harder to criticise folk who might well have used the controller themselves, at retail price, but upon discovering they've effectively paid 2.5x decide to put their controller onto the resale market.

[andrewaylett]

One might imagine a world, which would have to be populated by non-humans, in which we do price discovery for every transaction. Scalpers wouldn't exist: each batch of goods would be sold via Dutch auction.

I do wonder whether such a scheme might work for console launches — you put in the price you'd be willing to pay a scalper, and the batch you're allocated to is the first batch where the auction price is lower than your bid. Then you pay the auction price for that batch.

Faithlife do something with a converse price discovery function for book digitisation: you enter the amount you're willing to pay for the result, and if N people are willing to pay at least $COST/N, they do the work. No point in scalping that: it's a digital product, the question is availability rather than quantity.

In a world populated by humans, and with a mass-market good with restricted availability, there's a societal pressure to avoid enabling scalpers. Whether you act by yourself running some kind of auction, or by attempting to limit the ability of scalpers to buy in bulk, or by ignoring the pressure (and possibly running your own scalping operation to front-run the third-party scalpers), is up to you.

[Forgeties79]

> Scalping is the fair market price discovery - it is basically a requirement in free trade societies

It discovers who has the wealth to buy up multiples of something and create artificial scarcity which preys on humans emotionally/psychologically, or worse, denies them essentials. Then the buyers are primarily more people with more income who can afford to brute force solve the problem.

It’s parasitic behavior that generates no value. They barge in as unwanted middlemen driving up prices artificially. It’s net bad and does not establish any sense of “true” value. It just makes more things out of reach for more people that don’t need to be.

I don’t begrudge a hobbyist occasionally up selling something of theirs or whatever, but people who make a regular income stream off of inserting themselves as middle men do not deserve the benefit of the doubt or any sort of spin control. It is lazy, selfish behavior that purely exists to enrich them at the expense of people of lower means. It does not help the market in any way, shape, or form.

[ssl-3]

> Scalping is the fair market price discovery - it is basically a requirement in free trade societies.

This explains why there is always a sea of scalpers milling around outside of every Costco in the United States, selling rotisserie chickens for as high as ten bucks after they bought them for $4.99.

It's basically a requirement, and it's a natural process of price discovery.