while doing nothing useful to anyone
Scalpers serve as a market mechanism that ensures that people who are willing to pay the most for the console get it (first).
I may be misremebering, but when Sony launched the PS2 they were selling it for like $1000 the first month and they slowly dropped the price every couple of months until they reached about $400 a year after launch. It might have also been the retailers doing that.
But that is what they teach you in Econ101, that in a free market the best solution to every problem is to charge what the market will bear.
Arguably a smart thing for Sony would be to run an auction to sell the consoles and pocket the money that goes to the scalpers now. On the other hand that would not be a good look for Sony which means scalpers serve a dual function, regulate the price and take the heat off from Sony.
It's almost like these device companies make the bulk of their money in software sales on devices rather than the devices themselves. They only make money on the things they don't actually make, which is about as capitalist as it gets.
Lol, rare to see people defending scalpers, even the chuds usually fucking despise them
Admittedly only when they are scalping something the chud wants but stillLibertarians love to defend scalpers. Particularly at the start of the Covid pandemic, there were a lot of them defending hoarding.
I got some redditor to consider socialism based off of an argument I made that everyone would have PS5s in a planned economy
In planned economy cloud gaming would make more sense than everyone owning an expensive single purpose computer they only occasionally use.
Maybe it doesn't work yet? Some people swear by the Stadia thing, so maybe it's getting closer. I guess it depends on your connection to the servers.
Either way if we're talking about planned economy those things could be ameliorated.
A server farm/greenhouse in every apartment building! :mao-aggro-shining:
I like seeing takes like this getting popular, they do tremendous damage to liberal narratives about the "fairness" and "meritocracy" of capitalism
We should promote the use of libertarians as our useful idiots
I see a lot of things wrong with the practice of scalping but since we're all under capitalism I don't really see the point in just demonizing this one aspect while ignoring the rest lol.
I'd have scalped too if I had the initial cash in hand. Whoever buys it obviously has enough surplus to just waste on whatever. You're just ripping off the bourgeois.
It's not like I could go and do something ethical to make similar amounts of money. It doesn't exist.
The practice of scalping is pretty shitty though. My mind goes to the diapers, hand sanitizer, alcohol, etc. right when the pandemic started (5 or 6 years ago or something). It's right there with price gouging like with bottled water during a hurricane.
I'm more frustrated with the people who had 100 chances to notice how shitty it is, but this is the first time they noticed.
Fair enough. Those scalping human necessities are definitely a different level of scum.
It doesn't bother me as much with shit like game consoles because everyone will be able to get one eventually. Scalping concert and sports tickets sucks a lot though because they're one-time events and scalping makes it so only the bourgeois can afford to attend or get decent seats without going broke.
Concert ticket scalping is so normalized that we have publicly traded businesses based around it lol
It's garbage, I have zero idea how people don't immediately realize that this is a natural consequence of capitalism
Cash isn't capital, reselling isn't bourgeois, and extra money isn't surplus value.
Higher prices are just the free market punishing the poor - there's nothing here that has anything to do with capital.
The free market tends to be supported mostly by capitalists but you're correct and my bad.
I shouldn't be muddying terms
You are essentially correct though that the process is the same as any other resale or pricing scheme.
Not sure who's defending consumption here. What is it you think I'm saying?
Literally higher prices are the free market punishing the poor. Whether it's game consoles, or food, or housing.
Sorry, where in this does capital come into play. Say I work my job, my surplus value is extracted by the company and I get my wage. Are you saying that whatever I buy with my wages is now capital? This makes no sense. Buying commodities with money is not ownership of the means of production.
So them say I take this item that I bought with my wages, and then resell it to another wage labourer who already has had their surplus value stolen by their employer. And say I even make money from it. This is called trade.
You're right I don't to ascribe trading in the market the same terminology that capitalists purchasing factories and underpaying wage-labourers, because it's not the same and it's not what those words mean.
Nowhere did I bring morality into this, so I'm not sure where you think I think that reselling shit to rip people off is moral, I'm just saying you're not using words right.
Buying stake in a company and purchasing a commodity are different things. If I buy stock with my wages, I might consider that stock capital because it will provide me income based on the labour of employees of that company and not my labor. And there is an argument that arbitrage of stock is capital accumulation.
But if I buy a commodity and resell it, nowhere am I siphoning someone else's labour to make that profit. Nobody is working for me to increase the value of the item I possess. My repricing and reselling might even be considered my own labour. I paid market value for a commodity and am reselling at a higher price. It may be unethical, but the gain in money from the arbitrage of goods is outside of the cycle of capital accumulation. Whose labour am I stealing value from?
Edit: I might be changing my mind about my definition of capital
Yes, I am. I see where my view of capital was wrong . Money isn't capital, but money used to buy commodity for profiting is capital.
I'm poor lol, so don't worry I don't have the necessary funds to
Pretty sure consoles are typically sold for below cost as a loss leader, and they make their money through licensing fees, accessories, and software sales. But the point still stands.
Yep
You can see it plainly with how much the digital only version is discounted, they are willing to eat a loss to get one in your hands so you keep buying other stuff
And with how it is now, you want to get as many as possible out there to increase your chances of landing the 'whales' who spend a thousand dollars on DLC.
MBS's steam account is one of the funniest things I ever seen.
I play a very predatory "free-to-play" game: Mario Kart Tour. You wouldn't believe what people write in the game's subreddit. You have posts like "I spent 40$ on lootboxes and couldn't be happier" very often. And when someone is complaining about their predatory tactics, you have almost half the answers taking the coorporations side. They would say stuff like "we can't complain that the gold pass doesn't have any value this month, we had great value last year". It's just sad sometimes, especially since Nintendo does everthing to squeeze out the last dime and last minute of playtime out of their customers. They recognized that people spend their gems on special loot boxes, so now you have a special box every second week. They saw that special tokens make the people play more so now you have some kind of special token every week. And people still take Nintendo's side. Some even complained that other players botted the f out of the special coins even though it has no effect on their own coins.
You see the same thing on the Pokemon Go subreddit, which is much worse than Mario Kart Tour. There's people who literally defend them not disclosing lootbox odds.
Nintendo fans are on another level. I've clocked out at some point before Nintendo discovered gacha, but I used to hear a lot of people saying "we need to buy [shit game] to show that there's interest in the franchise!" And i swear fans think that Nintendo is an indie dev, with how often people would say that we should "support" them
mario cart went free to play with loot boxes? :transshork-sad:
The game catalogue for the thing is pathetic. It's 100% fomo but just for the possessing the game playing brick.
both of these say otherwise :p
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-06-15-xbox-one-x-selling-at-a-loss
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/ps4-to-be-sold-at-a-loss-but-launch-day-recoup-expected-from-ps-plus-subs-and-launch-titles-2905846#:~:text=Sony%20has%20confirmed%20that%20the,sales%20of%20the%20PS4%20hardware.
Well askhually consoles are sold at a loss at the beginning of their life cycle and Sony and Microsoft make profits off game sales, PS plus and Xbox live. The sale of consoles itself only start to turn a profit at the time the slim models or revision models are sold
