In a sad display of poor character it is made obvious that the practice of buying products at full price and re-selling them at 100% or more times their market value has taken its toll on the launch of the next generation of gaming.
What Is Happening?
To put it bluntly, people acting in bad faith are taking advantage of sellers to mass buyout as many pieces of next-generation consoles and hardware (including Playstation’s PS5, Xbox’s Series X, and Nvidia’s 3080 GPU) to then resell at unattainable prices.
How Do We Combat This?
Right now the only way to ensure this doesn’t happen is to impose laws restricting the practice of creating bots to buyout new products and resell them.
What these people are doing is immoral and goes against the idea of a free and open economy where the consumer decides what should stay on the market.
Another way to combat this is to boycott the products that scalpers have taken advantage of, and refuse to give them any business.
Another solution is to sign this petition and raise awareness among people to fight against this morally bankrupt practice.
You can find that petition here: https://www.change.org/p/united-states-congress-make-scalping-illegal-across-the-us
The Long Term
If nothing is done about this, a horrible precedent may take place where its expected that the only legitimate place to buy gaming hardware (and other non-gaming related products) is from sketchy resellers on various third party websites.
Its a horrible thought that the future of gaming is being dictated not by game developers pushing the envelope on what games can and can’t do, but on the morality of re-sellers pushing the envelope on what they can and can’t get away with.
In Conclusion
The practice of buying out retailers and reselling their products has destroyed the launch of 3 major tech companies new generation of entertainment products, and its time to put an end to this.
Gaming Matters has created a petition to the US congress to fix this issue once and for all. I hope you’ll take the time to read our points and sign it if you believe in the mission.
You can find the petition here: https://www.change.org/p/united-states-congress-make-scalping-illegal-across-the-us