Skimming in Gaming

Since the dawn of economics, people have been there to make a quick buck out of absolutely no work, and still today it happens all the time. 

Disgusting people buy up as much of an item as they can, then resell it for exorbitantly high prices. This happens around the holidays, and when big new products are coming out, many people have just accepted it as a fact of life. 

Recently some people have been getting rather fed up with it though, with the release of the Xbox Series X and the Playstation 5, which were sold for the standard retail price of $499 at Walmart, Target, or on Amazon but can now be bought for the low price of over a thousand dollars on eBay and Mercari. 

I’ve personally been able to find several listings over two thousand dollars, three of which actually trying to sell a PS5 and two Xbox Series Xs for ten thousand dollars to whatever poor fool is desperate enough. 

While this sort of behavior isn’t illegal, you did buy the product after all, and are free to sell it when and how you please, but it is one of the most scummy things you can do in the industry. The kind of people who do this put in absolutely no work, cheat the average consumer out of fair prices, and with only one sale, make enough money to buy and sell two more of whatever they are selling. 

They often don’t even have to put in the orders or make the listing themselves, as they use programs that automatically buy as much of the item as possible and create several listings online to sell them. They put in none of the work for double the profit from people who are paying double the price. 

This issue isn’t simply solved with not giving them your money either. If you want the product, it’s not like you can buy it from traditional retailers as they already bought the entire stock the moment it became available, and the only people who would be selling it are selling it for double the price as well. 

It’s a morally depraved act that is acted out by scum who deserve none of the money they’ve gotten. 

Imagine being a parent leading up to Christmas. Your child has been asking for months for the new PS5, and you have been waiting for the moment it releases to order it. Say you aren’t as tech savvy, so you don’t understand that you need to be there the moment it releases, so instead you wait even a few hours after it went available. 

You go to order the PS5 you child has desperately wanted as their big gift this year, only to find they are suddenly double, maybe even triple, the original price. Now you have to make a choice: spend double what you were planning and likely can’t afford, or knowingly let them down this year. 

Many parents chose the first option. They want to make their kid happy and have a good Christmas with the very thing they have wanted all year long. People shouldn’t have to pay double the price for something just because some morally degenerate person wanted to make a quick several thousand bucks. 

I encourage you and everyone else to not support this kind of behavior that only serves to hurt normal consumers and benefit people blatantly holding products hostage for even more of your money. Only as a community can these sorts of things be stopped, by showing in unity that this kind of behavior is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.