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Bots behind the game console shortage

86 points by danso 4y ago

oliwarner 4y ago
I'm surprised that direct sales with one-per-address aren't a thing yet. Cuts out the 15-30% cut your retailers are taking, boggles scalpers, guarantees your fans get what they want, without anyone getting ripped off. I don't understand the problem. I've had everything from a spanner to a chair shipped directly from Chinese factories. What's stopping them doing the same with high end consumer electronics?
scblock 4y ago
The text right at the top of the page, "Resellers aren’t the problem — their buying bots are", is some of the densest bullshit I have ever read. How can someone be so colossally stupid as to write and publish that line? Acting like the blame is with the people who write the scalping tools but not those who purchase and use them? Are you serious with this crap? Every single person in this chain of value-free market manipulation is culpable.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway821909 4y ago
  "bad_country's threatening behaviour is becoming a real problem..." "woah, careful not to blame the people, it's their /leaders/ we don't like" (level of popular support for leaders never questioned) "stop telling consumers to save energy when these companies pollute as much as ### people" (omitted: in the course of producing half the world's fertiliser or whatever) You see it all the time
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The myth of democracy insists that we never admit the majority could truly pick something stupid or evil or against us, the perfectly enlightened.
- strifey 4y ago
  I'm not even sure what point they could reasonably be trying to make distinguishing between the two. One doesn't really exist without the other.
- burnished 4y ago
  Amplification can take actions that are bearable or even good at one scale, and make them very bad at another.
mjfl 4y ago
if you are able to do a resale at a much higher price, the price from Sony or whatever should be higher. The bots are just discovering the real market price. Not sure why they don't raise the price to whatever the bots are selling at.
- 30944836 4y ago
  >Not sure why they don't raise the price to whatever the bots are selling at. Because if they do this, the response will be "Sony is greedy charging people all this money for something that only costs them $x to make." I am not accusing you of this, just linking this to statements and thoughts that often arise in this context. A very typical response to questions about why something costs what it does is, "It's just supply and demand. Econ 101." But it's not just Econ 101. Supply and Demand is covered in Econ 101, but economic activity is far more advanced than supply and demand. Brand perception, customer good will, supplier agreements, retailing agreements.. all of these are major factors in determine "what" the price of an item is when it appears on the shelf. This is the work of entire teams at companies as big as Sony.
  - mjfl 4y ago
    > "Sony is greedy charging people all this money for something that only costs them $x to make." "then stop buying it" Sony will never actually say this. But this would be the 'cynical capitalist' response.
    - compiler-guy 4y ago
      Sony needs people to buy it, and if the scalpers do it and resell, then Sony doesn't pay the reputational cost.
      - 30944836 4y ago
        Yep. Even better, if they flood the market with additional units and sell them at the same price, it's the resellers (scalpers) take the hit, and not them. Sony is probably selling them at a loss and intending to make it up on the software (game) sales. This means doing anything to decrease the demand, even a little, reduces their ability to make money on the part of the business that is intended to make the money.
polskibus 4y ago
Seems like HFT in the real world. What did hft defenders always say? That they are just liquidity providers, right? But no one says there is a need for this extra liquidity. I wonder whether regulators will ever target this.
- ChadNauseam 4y ago
  This is just arbitrage, and has very little to do with HFT. In a normal market, scalpers don’t exist because when products are flying off the shelves you either raise your prices or increase your production. Game console companies are for some reason unwilling to sell their consoles at auction (which would eliminate scalpers) or increase production so an arbitrage opportunity is born
- seabird 4y ago
  Consumers are seeing a need for the scalpers; their service is valued at $200-$300. Whether or not 20 people botted a single one for their own personal use, or one person botted 20 to scalp, you don't have one in the end. Pay $200ish over MSRP and all the headache of locating and securing one goes away. It would be nice if supply kept up, but it's clear at this point that it's not going to.
  - teakettle42 4y ago
    > their service is valued at $200-$300 What service? > Pay $200ish over MSRP and all the headache of locating and securing one goes away. They create the headache in the first place. Do you also think a protection racket provides a service? If you pay them for protection, all the headache of your business being firebombed goes away!
    - michaelt 4y ago
      > What service? Imagine if, to get the latest gadget you had to queue outside a store for 30 hours - but you could hire someone to queue for you. Theoretically one could argue the scalpers are queuing so you don’t have to.
    - 4y ago
mikestew 4y ago
iPhones are a hot commodity, I wonder why I never have to play "beat the scalper" when I want to buy one? I don't wonder at all, of course, because when I order a iPhone that is in short supply I simply get placed in a queue. It might be three months before I get a phone, but at least I know I don't have to spend my days refreshing a web page. I order, I'm done with that task until it shows up. But, yeah, blame the players and not those that could shut down the game any time they like.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  I just buy whatever is available. I've never noticed the difference between Samsung AXX and Samsung SYY. It takes calls, pictures, emails and texts, can auth, slack and alert me for meetings. Who cares about everything else?
- jandrese 4y ago
  So the solution is to have Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo sell directly to the consumer? Apple can do this because they don't have to keep third party retailers happy, they own the distribution chain from top to bottom.
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    Is that so crazy? Direct to consumer seems like an obvious solution to the problem. What are all of the middlemen adding, anyway?
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      The economy is full of all sorts of middlemen. They know local markets, and it's easier to deal with a few of them than all the consumers. For a heck of a lot of businesses. Apple is pretty special in that they've got the whole consumer end themselves.
    - chupchap 4y ago
      Adding middlemen spreads money across geographies as opposed to the money flowing directly to the HQ. To use a car analogy a local dealership creates jobs and ensures some of the money spent by people in an area is recirculated in the area.
stavros 4y ago
Scalping bad, arbitrage good.
bowsamic 4y ago
The total inability for anyone to get a PS5 is one of the strangest things I've seen in modern gaming. Sony have even basically stopped marketing it and resigned to defeat. It almost feels like we're going to skip this console generation.
- cartoonfoxes 4y ago
  You would think they would be incentivized to fix this problem, even though it has been going on for years now. People will lose interest eventually and spend their money elsewhere. A few years back I was going to build a gaming PC, with an RTX 1080. I could never find the card in stock. As the years passed that 1080 became a 2080, then a 3080, and finally a bass guitar.
  - vkou 4y ago
    3080s are buyable at essentially MSRP these days.
    - cartoonfoxes 4y ago
      These days I've lost interest. My point was that availability affected what I ultimately spent (and did not spend) my money on.
      - babypuncher 4y ago
        You couldn't have been interested for that long. Crypto mining took a big hit in 2018. The market was flooded with used GTX 10-series GPUs. When Nvidia's RTX cards launched in August, they were somewhat difficult to find for a couple of months but by the start of 2019 they were actually struggling to move inventory because used mining GPUs were still flooding the market for so little money. GPUs were not hard to buy again until the pandemic started and demand skyrocketed during lockdowns.
        tomxor 4y ago
throw__away7391 4y ago
So I guess the solution is for Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo to stop selling consoles and sell monthly subscriptions for console-as-a-service instead.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Microsoft is already going in there direction with Xbox game pass and cloud gaming. The writing is on the wall.
- CMay 4y ago
  Microsoft is already sort of just, doing both while keeping retailers within that loop with Xbox All Access which includes cloud gaming - https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-all-access https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-all-access If you want to buy a console off the shelf you have to compete with other buyers, but sometimes there's a separate pool of consoles reserved for Xbox All Access subscribers. Subscribing to it isn't something you should really do if you're intending to flip the console and it's harder for scalpers to scale up. It requires a credit check and on-going payments, plus it includes Game Pass Ultimate which cannot be resold as it's part of the cost of the subscription which could eat into scalper profits. Attempting to scalp through Xbox All Access is probably a losing proposition unless you were to go down darker more illegal paths.
  - throw__away7391 4y ago
    Oh wow...I meant that half-joking. I played a lot as a kid but not so much in recent decades. I'm constantly surprised by the prevalence of DLC and add-ons any time I open up a modern game. In my memory a game system is something you throw into a plastic grocery bag and bike over to your friend's house where you try to reach around to screw the coaxial cable onto the back of their TV without knocking over the speaker on their parent's sound system. I can't imagine any kid getting access to a credit card for in-game purchases.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I’m starting to suspect that outside of Nintendo perhaps, that most of the consoles customers already have credit cards.
daenz 4y ago
I never understood why the retailers of these consoles don't adjust their prices to reflect the demand, so that there's at least some supply. When the PS5 first came out, for example, the price with retailers was like 1/4th of the price on ebay, and it was impossible to buy from the retailers. Wouldn't it be better for everyone if the retailers adjusted the prices? At least then, the incentive to be a reseller/scalper would diminish to nothing, which means you don't pay for their premium.
- blitzar 4y ago
  > Wouldn't it be better for everyone if the retailers adjusted the prices? They have - you could buy a console bundled with a game, headset and a tshirt for huge markups.
- qwery 4y ago
  - Consoles in stockrooms are not making money for the retailer or the platform/brand/manufacturer. - Sales figures (units shipped) are a marketing point. A product being so in demand that it makes the news is a free marketing campaign. - Retailer got so many units to sell at a margin/price they already decided on. The fact that the stock moved out the door is a win already. Customers coming inside to find out that there are no PS5s are customers inside the shop. - It seems likely that Sony/whoever may have some control over the pricing. Whether this is a formal agreement or a gentle suggestion, ignoring or breaking that deal would presumably (at least) sour the relationship. - Surely the retailer that moves first would lose business to their competitors. I guess at that point, the competitor/s run out of stock and now the first mover is the scalper? - If we're assuming that the retailers have some altruistic motive, they could implement strategies to combat the bots / buying en masse. This does not appear to be something they are interested in. > Wouldn't it be better for everyone if the retailers adjusted the prices? The people who are already priced out will be in the same situation, except now it's the "good guys" doing price gouging. The scalpers will have lost their business to the retailer I guess.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Because then they would get the backlash and bad PR instead of scalpers.
havblue 4y ago
I would think it would be in the retailers best interest to require an online account in order to sell a console as well. Scalpers don't stock up on physical games unless they're limited edition. It's in the retailers' best interest to get physical people in their doors.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Target was showing “zero Xboxes in stock, check store” in the app whilst I was staring at one on the shelf (which I bought, it’s a DVD player after all). I think they’ve figured part of it out. I’ve also noticed that the app prices are often higher than the store shelf prices … even if you order for pickup. So I have my eye on them.
  - grepfru_it 4y ago
    depends on your target. my local targets are pretty accurate with inventory management. as a comparison; my local bestbuy is not (website said they had usb drives in stock, when i got there they didn't have any)
swighton 4y ago
I wonder if people who are willing to pay extra for consoles from a scalper are more likely to spend more on games / digital downloads / etc. If that is true it would be an incentive for sony / microsoft to NOT fix the problem...
- havblue 4y ago
  I suppose you're saying that only the "whales" get the new systems. I would think it means less disposable income for whoever gets the newer systems. Also, nobody will actively be playing them and spending money on microtransactions when they're in the scalpers' possession.
buescher 4y ago
I thought Microsoft's scalping mitigation was clever: for a long while now there has been no shortage of availability of the Xbox All Access bundle: you buy the Xbox Series X/S on time, bundled with a Game Pass Ultimate subscription, at a small discount over buying the Xbox up front and paying for 2 years of Game Pass Ultimate, so effectively negative interest.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  This assumes you also want the subscription. Which I imagine cannot be resold
  - samatman 4y ago
    What's more important is that it sets a ceiling for scalpers profit. This is lower than the XBox+bundle price, even if you wouldn't buy the subscription, because you do get the subscription, no one will pay the same price for just the XBox, my guess would be a small market for half the subscription price, which is barely worth scalping over.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    I'd imagine most purchasers do want it. I didn't and eventually was able to get a series X through Costco but another few weeks of missing out and I might have bit the bullet and paid for the subscription. And yeah, I'm pretty sure the sub was tied to the Xbox itself, so you'd have to resell everything.
duxup 4y ago
I wish I could buy direct from Nintendo. Have an account with them, I buy stuff, have history. Let me buy my OLD Switch directly.
- jbenner-radham 4y ago
  They do sell directly. However unfortunately the OLED Switch is currently sold out: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/nintendo-switch-oled-model-white-set/ https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/nintendo-switch-oled...
  - duxup 4y ago
    TY
seunosewa 4y ago
Fundamentally, it's a mispricing issue. The consoles are too cheap. The manufacturers aren't producing enough to satisfy the quantity demanded at the prices they are charging. This allows scalpers to make money off consumers. They should probably raise their prices while the shortage lasts.
- bombcar 4y ago
  They’re priced against each other also, and they have a delicate balance to work with to make sure they don’t become “too expensive” in the minds of consumers.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
boomboomsubban 4y ago
Imagine paying $500 for a web scraper.
- Cyph0n 4y ago
  You’d be surprised how much effort goes into reverse engineering APIs and keeping these bots working across many sites as they get updated. I actually tried writing a simple checkout bot for Bestbuy. After a couple of hours of fiddling around, I concluded that buying a bot would be much easier than figuring out how the BB API works and keeping up with any changes. Disclaimer: I never ended up buying a bot - it was just a learning activity.
- esjeon 4y ago
  Imagine reselling PS5s with $500 margin. Not a bad deal when the market is irrational.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    A PS5 is easily worth $1000 to me. I don't see how buying one for $650 is irrational. I spent a few days refreshing twitter and figured it wasn't worth $150 after a year.
  - gruez 4y ago
    Irrational? If you derive enjoyment from a product, why wouldn't you want to pay to have it a bit sooner?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
boopmaster 4y ago
PS5 market is definitely bonkers. After sitting through some of the crazy queues on the playstation site and giving up on direct to consumer I did manage to score one, but it was tedious for a few days getting hammered by every twitter notification from a few of those accounts that watch and post when stock becomes available. When I did land a unit, it wasn't without a price shock of its own as GameStop was selling as bundles. So, yeah I ended up with maybe a couple of games that I would rather not have bought up front and they were pretty close to full retail price. This was all very, very frustrating. Sony knows I have years of history with them going back to PS3 era. They could throw me a freakin' bone and let me reserve a spot in a queue, even if it was in agreement with a 3rd party retailer - I'd be cool with that. They could manage this situation so much better. // Not to mention that once I got my unit, the storage evaporated almost immediately. PS5s hold about 5 or 6 "large games" at a time!
photochemsyn 4y ago
Reading the article, this seems to be the core issue: > “When your browser checks out an item on a retail site, it sends ‘requests’ to the site’s server. These requests are basically commands that tell the server what to do. Add this item to the cart, submit my order, and so on,” they wrote. “We send those commands associated with checking out to the servers of sites we automate without requiring a browser. Basically, we can mimic what a human does, stripping out the unnecessary lags and delays of a browser.” > "The service is optimized for Target, Best Buy, Amazon, and Walmart." This is hardly just game consoles, the whole baby formula problem is similarly gamed: https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2022/05/13/baby-formula-shortage-bots-snap-up-inventory/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2022/05/13/baby-fo... Basically, if you see a shortage anywhere in the consumer/retail goods market, you can use a pool of capital to buy up all the remaining product as quickly as possible - assuming you have access to a pool of capital. This is the same kind of thing that happens in wartime scarcity, the only difference between this and say WWII is the bot technology being used. Now you're the sole supplier and can jack up prices and earn huge percentages. The resellers are just little black market manipulators, in other words, and the bot writers are their facilitators. However, the main sources of product are the big corporate retailers, Amazon etc. They can't jack up the prices themselves (well, they can to some extent as current 'inflation' price hikes are resulting in record profits), but do they really care if automated bots are placing orders? Are they going to write bot-detecting software that might reduce the amount of orders being placed online? Why would they, that would reduce revenue. It's not too surprising that this situation has come about, it's basically monopolistic manipulation of markets throughout the whole supply chain. A deregulated neoliberal paradise has many similarities to a war zone economy.
- mdasen 4y ago
  > current 'inflation' price hikes are resulting in record profits This is misinformation. Walmart's net income is down 25% year-over-year. Target's is down 41% year-over-year. Excluding the $7.6B Rivian Automotive loss, Amazon's net income went from $8.1B to $0.04B, down 99.5% year-over-year. That loss would have been larger if AWS wasn't doing so extremely well on growth - AWS operating income was up 57% year-over-year. North America retail went from $3.45B operating income to a $1.568B operating loss. International retail went from $1.252B operating income to $1.281B operating loss. I think a lot of people look at revenue (which will go up with inflation) rather than income (which is what is left over when you take out the costs). As costs rise faster than retail can raise their prices, margins are getting squeezed. Consumers have an idea of what a product should cost in their heads and it takes time for that to get un-stuck. There's a reason that retail stocks tanked 9 days ago - investors saw Walmart's earnings on the 17th and Target's on the 18th. They weren't raking in profits. Inflation was squeezing them.
throwaway675309 4y ago
Is there a reason that retailers for certain hot commodities don't just require a unique credit card coupled with a unique shipping address to effectively limit a customer to one item? Have this restriction automatically lift after two weeks from the last purchase for that particular customer so that they can buy another one if sufficient time has elapsed. I'm baffled because it feels like this would instantaneously fix the scalping problem and it's not particularly difficult to implement.
- sapienwastey 4y ago
  There are services which give you a one time CC number such as privacy.com. I'm unsure how shipping address might also get similarly obsfucated (po boxes?).
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    If you’ve ever dealt with e-commerce or checkout you know that there are a lot of ways to write the same address, and it isn’t easy to know when it is the same address. As an example I lived in a building that had boxes for mail and unit numbers that differed (I think it was for privacy or something, but you could put both or just one and the mail would get there). So a package going to Unit 1A or Box 28 were going to the same place. Add in the fact that there are multiple ways to write this out: #1A, Apt. 1A, Apartment 1A, 1A, Suite 1A Then you can game the box: PMB 28, #28, bx28. Then you can start gaming the names: F Middle Last, First Middle, Last First. Make up a name, or use someone else’s. Anything you assume about addresses probably has an exception. And then, yes, there are private mailbox services that will just receive packages on your behalf.
- pg_bot 4y ago
  This is likely a losing strategy, while it would likely work for a little while people will find a way to circumvent the restriction. The simpler way to get around scalping/arbitrage is to raise prices so that those who are producing the product are the beneficiaries of the higher price. They can then turn around and tell customers that they are taking that revenue and putting it back into producing more widgets. However, there are certain industries where a lack of supply and rewarding middlemen is actually part of the business strategy. In fashion, entertainment, and luxury goods there is a certain cachet in obtaining items that other people cannot.
causality0 4y ago
If manufacturers were actually interested in quashing resellers they could bind the console to a specific user account during the order process, say for three or six months.
lamontcg 4y ago
> Manufactured scarcity is crucial to a bot’s notoriety, says a person who knows the sneaker industry and asked to remain anonymous for employment concerns. It lets us imagine the sea of PS5s that could be ours, if only we could breach through that locked door. “Creating FOMO is part of the business plan,” the person says. Are you a programmer that wants some internet fame and name notoriety? Write an open source bot that is free for everyone to use which duplicates these kinds of features, but is geared more towards the average person who just wants to score a single ps/5. Flood the bot market with competition.
- tragiclos 4y ago
  While I would certainly welcome such a project, I wonder if a truly open source bot would be hampered by the fact that online retailers could view the source and proactively circumvent whatever strategy it implements.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    But if they wanted to stop scalpers they could do it trivially by limiting purchases per credit card or address or whatever. Seems more likely that they don't care.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure they could look at their web requests and stop the proprietary bots almost just as easily.
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    Would they? If you just send requests to Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, whatever for "check if item is in stock, if yes buy" and loop once a minute why would the retailer implement something to stop you?
- brokenodometer 4y ago
  Exist(ted) for GPUs, unsure if it still works. https://github.com/Hari-Nagarajan/fairgame https://github.com/Hari-Nagarajan/fairgame
Rasbora 4y ago
I wrote a blog post about this exact problem half a year ago, specifically going into detail about the proxy networks scalpers use, and how to detect them: https://rasbora.dev/blog/detecting-residential-proxy-networks https://rasbora.dev/blog/detecting-residential-proxy-network...

86 points by danso 4y ago

I'm surprised that direct sales with one-per-address aren't a thing yet. Cuts out the 15-30% cut your retailers are taking, boggles scalpers, guarantees your fans get what they want, without anyone getting ripped off. I don't understand the problem. I've had everything from a spanner to a chair shipped directly from Chinese factories. What's stopping them doing the same with high end consumer electronics?

scblock 4y ago

The text right at the top of the page, "Resellers aren’t the problem — their buying bots are", is some of the densest bullshit I have ever read. How can someone be so colossally stupid as to write and publish that line? Acting like the blame is with the people who write the scalping tools but not those who purchase and use them? Are you serious with this crap? Every single person in this chain of value-free market manipulation is culpable.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
throwaway821909 4y ago
"bad_country's threatening behaviour is becoming a real problem..." "woah, careful not to blame the people, it's their /leaders/ we don't like" (level of popular support for leaders never questioned) "stop telling consumers to save energy when these companies pollute as much as ### people" (omitted: in the course of producing half the world's fertiliser or whatever) You see it all the time
- bombcar 4y ago
  The myth of democracy insists that we never admit the majority could truly pick something stupid or evil or against us, the perfectly enlightened.
strifey 4y ago
I'm not even sure what point they could reasonably be trying to make distinguishing between the two. One doesn't really exist without the other.
burnished 4y ago
Amplification can take actions that are bearable or even good at one scale, and make them very bad at another.

mjfl 4y ago

if you are able to do a resale at a much higher price, the price from Sony or whatever should be higher. The bots are just discovering the real market price. Not sure why they don't raise the price to whatever the bots are selling at.

30944836 4y ago
>Not sure why they don't raise the price to whatever the bots are selling at. Because if they do this, the response will be "Sony is greedy charging people all this money for something that only costs them $x to make." I am not accusing you of this, just linking this to statements and thoughts that often arise in this context. A very typical response to questions about why something costs what it does is, "It's just supply and demand. Econ 101." But it's not just Econ 101. Supply and Demand is covered in Econ 101, but economic activity is far more advanced than supply and demand. Brand perception, customer good will, supplier agreements, retailing agreements.. all of these are major factors in determine "what" the price of an item is when it appears on the shelf. This is the work of entire teams at companies as big as Sony.
- mjfl 4y ago
  > "Sony is greedy charging people all this money for something that only costs them $x to make." "then stop buying it" Sony will never actually say this. But this would be the 'cynical capitalist' response.
  - compiler-guy 4y ago
    Sony needs people to buy it, and if the scalpers do it and resell, then Sony doesn't pay the reputational cost.
    - 30944836 4y ago
      Yep. Even better, if they flood the market with additional units and sell them at the same price, it's the resellers (scalpers) take the hit, and not them. Sony is probably selling them at a loss and intending to make it up on the software (game) sales. This means doing anything to decrease the demand, even a little, reduces their ability to make money on the part of the business that is intended to make the money.

polskibus 4y ago

Seems like HFT in the real world. What did hft defenders always say? That they are just liquidity providers, right? But no one says there is a need for this extra liquidity. I wonder whether regulators will ever target this.

ChadNauseam 4y ago
This is just arbitrage, and has very little to do with HFT. In a normal market, scalpers don’t exist because when products are flying off the shelves you either raise your prices or increase your production. Game console companies are for some reason unwilling to sell their consoles at auction (which would eliminate scalpers) or increase production so an arbitrage opportunity is born
seabird 4y ago
Consumers are seeing a need for the scalpers; their service is valued at $200-$300. Whether or not 20 people botted a single one for their own personal use, or one person botted 20 to scalp, you don't have one in the end. Pay $200ish over MSRP and all the headache of locating and securing one goes away. It would be nice if supply kept up, but it's clear at this point that it's not going to.
- teakettle42 4y ago
  > their service is valued at $200-$300 What service? > Pay $200ish over MSRP and all the headache of locating and securing one goes away. They create the headache in the first place. Do you also think a protection racket provides a service? If you pay them for protection, all the headache of your business being firebombed goes away!
  - michaelt 4y ago
    > What service? Imagine if, to get the latest gadget you had to queue outside a store for 30 hours - but you could hire someone to queue for you. Theoretically one could argue the scalpers are queuing so you don’t have to.
  - 4y ago

mikestew 4y ago

iPhones are a hot commodity, I wonder why I never have to play "beat the scalper" when I want to buy one? I don't wonder at all, of course, because when I order a iPhone that is in short supply I simply get placed in a queue. It might be three months before I get a phone, but at least I know I don't have to spend my days refreshing a web page. I order, I'm done with that task until it shows up. But, yeah, blame the players and not those that could shut down the game any time they like.

anothernewdude 4y ago
I just buy whatever is available. I've never noticed the difference between Samsung AXX and Samsung SYY. It takes calls, pictures, emails and texts, can auth, slack and alert me for meetings. Who cares about everything else?
jandrese 4y ago
So the solution is to have Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo sell directly to the consumer? Apple can do this because they don't have to keep third party retailers happy, they own the distribution chain from top to bottom.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  Is that so crazy? Direct to consumer seems like an obvious solution to the problem. What are all of the middlemen adding, anyway?
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    The economy is full of all sorts of middlemen. They know local markets, and it's easier to deal with a few of them than all the consumers. For a heck of a lot of businesses. Apple is pretty special in that they've got the whole consumer end themselves.
  - chupchap 4y ago
    Adding middlemen spreads money across geographies as opposed to the money flowing directly to the HQ. To use a car analogy a local dealership creates jobs and ensures some of the money spent by people in an area is recirculated in the area.

stavros 4y ago

Scalping bad, arbitrage good.

bowsamic 4y ago

The total inability for anyone to get a PS5 is one of the strangest things I've seen in modern gaming. Sony have even basically stopped marketing it and resigned to defeat. It almost feels like we're going to skip this console generation.

cartoonfoxes 4y ago
You would think they would be incentivized to fix this problem, even though it has been going on for years now. People will lose interest eventually and spend their money elsewhere. A few years back I was going to build a gaming PC, with an RTX 1080. I could never find the card in stock. As the years passed that 1080 became a 2080, then a 3080, and finally a bass guitar.
- vkou 4y ago
  3080s are buyable at essentially MSRP these days.
  - cartoonfoxes 4y ago
    These days I've lost interest. My point was that availability affected what I ultimately spent (and did not spend) my money on.
    - babypuncher 4y ago
      You couldn't have been interested for that long. Crypto mining took a big hit in 2018. The market was flooded with used GTX 10-series GPUs. When Nvidia's RTX cards launched in August, they were somewhat difficult to find for a couple of months but by the start of 2019 they were actually struggling to move inventory because used mining GPUs were still flooding the market for so little money. GPUs were not hard to buy again until the pandemic started and demand skyrocketed during lockdowns.
      - tomxor 4y ago

throw__away7391 4y ago

So I guess the solution is for Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo to stop selling consoles and sell monthly subscriptions for console-as-a-service instead.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Microsoft is already going in there direction with Xbox game pass and cloud gaming. The writing is on the wall.
CMay 4y ago
Microsoft is already sort of just, doing both while keeping retailers within that loop with Xbox All Access which includes cloud gaming - https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-all-access https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-all-access If you want to buy a console off the shelf you have to compete with other buyers, but sometimes there's a separate pool of consoles reserved for Xbox All Access subscribers. Subscribing to it isn't something you should really do if you're intending to flip the console and it's harder for scalpers to scale up. It requires a credit check and on-going payments, plus it includes Game Pass Ultimate which cannot be resold as it's part of the cost of the subscription which could eat into scalper profits. Attempting to scalp through Xbox All Access is probably a losing proposition unless you were to go down darker more illegal paths.
- throw__away7391 4y ago
  Oh wow...I meant that half-joking. I played a lot as a kid but not so much in recent decades. I'm constantly surprised by the prevalence of DLC and add-ons any time I open up a modern game. In my memory a game system is something you throw into a plastic grocery bag and bike over to your friend's house where you try to reach around to screw the coaxial cable onto the back of their TV without knocking over the speaker on their parent's sound system. I can't imagine any kid getting access to a credit card for in-game purchases.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I’m starting to suspect that outside of Nintendo perhaps, that most of the consoles customers already have credit cards.

daenz 4y ago

I never understood why the retailers of these consoles don't adjust their prices to reflect the demand, so that there's at least some supply. When the PS5 first came out, for example, the price with retailers was like 1/4th of the price on ebay, and it was impossible to buy from the retailers. Wouldn't it be better for everyone if the retailers adjusted the prices? At least then, the incentive to be a reseller/scalper would diminish to nothing, which means you don't pay for their premium.

blitzar 4y ago
> Wouldn't it be better for everyone if the retailers adjusted the prices? They have - you could buy a console bundled with a game, headset and a tshirt for huge markups.
qwery 4y ago
- Consoles in stockrooms are not making money for the retailer or the platform/brand/manufacturer. - Sales figures (units shipped) are a marketing point. A product being so in demand that it makes the news is a free marketing campaign. - Retailer got so many units to sell at a margin/price they already decided on. The fact that the stock moved out the door is a win already. Customers coming inside to find out that there are no PS5s are customers inside the shop. - It seems likely that Sony/whoever may have some control over the pricing. Whether this is a formal agreement or a gentle suggestion, ignoring or breaking that deal would presumably (at least) sour the relationship. - Surely the retailer that moves first would lose business to their competitors. I guess at that point, the competitor/s run out of stock and now the first mover is the scalper? - If we're assuming that the retailers have some altruistic motive, they could implement strategies to combat the bots / buying en masse. This does not appear to be something they are interested in. > Wouldn't it be better for everyone if the retailers adjusted the prices? The people who are already priced out will be in the same situation, except now it's the "good guys" doing price gouging. The scalpers will have lost their business to the retailer I guess.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Because then they would get the backlash and bad PR instead of scalpers.

havblue 4y ago

I would think it would be in the retailers best interest to require an online account in order to sell a console as well. Scalpers don't stock up on physical games unless they're limited edition. It's in the retailers' best interest to get physical people in their doors.

bombcar 4y ago
Target was showing “zero Xboxes in stock, check store” in the app whilst I was staring at one on the shelf (which I bought, it’s a DVD player after all). I think they’ve figured part of it out. I’ve also noticed that the app prices are often higher than the store shelf prices … even if you order for pickup. So I have my eye on them.
- grepfru_it 4y ago
  depends on your target. my local targets are pretty accurate with inventory management. as a comparison; my local bestbuy is not (website said they had usb drives in stock, when i got there they didn't have any)

swighton 4y ago

I wonder if people who are willing to pay extra for consoles from a scalper are more likely to spend more on games / digital downloads / etc. If that is true it would be an incentive for sony / microsoft to NOT fix the problem...

havblue 4y ago
I suppose you're saying that only the "whales" get the new systems. I would think it means less disposable income for whoever gets the newer systems. Also, nobody will actively be playing them and spending money on microtransactions when they're in the scalpers' possession.

buescher 4y ago

I thought Microsoft's scalping mitigation was clever: for a long while now there has been no shortage of availability of the Xbox All Access bundle: you buy the Xbox Series X/S on time, bundled with a Game Pass Ultimate subscription, at a small discount over buying the Xbox up front and paying for 2 years of Game Pass Ultimate, so effectively negative interest.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
This assumes you also want the subscription. Which I imagine cannot be resold
- samatman 4y ago
  What's more important is that it sets a ceiling for scalpers profit. This is lower than the XBox+bundle price, even if you wouldn't buy the subscription, because you do get the subscription, no one will pay the same price for just the XBox, my guess would be a small market for half the subscription price, which is barely worth scalping over.
- brewdad 4y ago
  I'd imagine most purchasers do want it. I didn't and eventually was able to get a series X through Costco but another few weeks of missing out and I might have bit the bullet and paid for the subscription. And yeah, I'm pretty sure the sub was tied to the Xbox itself, so you'd have to resell everything.

duxup 4y ago

I wish I could buy direct from Nintendo. Have an account with them, I buy stuff, have history. Let me buy my OLD Switch directly.

jbenner-radham 4y ago
They do sell directly. However unfortunately the OLED Switch is currently sold out: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/nintendo-switch-oled-model-white-set/ https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/nintendo-switch-oled...
- duxup 4y ago
  TY

seunosewa 4y ago

Fundamentally, it's a mispricing issue. The consoles are too cheap. The manufacturers aren't producing enough to satisfy the quantity demanded at the prices they are charging. This allows scalpers to make money off consumers. They should probably raise their prices while the shortage lasts.

bombcar 4y ago
They’re priced against each other also, and they have a delicate balance to work with to make sure they don’t become “too expensive” in the minds of consumers.

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boomboomsubban 4y ago

Imagine paying $500 for a web scraper.

Cyph0n 4y ago
You’d be surprised how much effort goes into reverse engineering APIs and keeping these bots working across many sites as they get updated. I actually tried writing a simple checkout bot for Bestbuy. After a couple of hours of fiddling around, I concluded that buying a bot would be much easier than figuring out how the BB API works and keeping up with any changes. Disclaimer: I never ended up buying a bot - it was just a learning activity.
esjeon 4y ago
Imagine reselling PS5s with $500 margin. Not a bad deal when the market is irrational.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  A PS5 is easily worth $1000 to me. I don't see how buying one for $650 is irrational. I spent a few days refreshing twitter and figured it wasn't worth $150 after a year.
- gruez 4y ago
  Irrational? If you derive enjoyment from a product, why wouldn't you want to pay to have it a bit sooner?
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boopmaster 4y ago

PS5 market is definitely bonkers. After sitting through some of the crazy queues on the playstation site and giving up on direct to consumer I did manage to score one, but it was tedious for a few days getting hammered by every twitter notification from a few of those accounts that watch and post when stock becomes available. When I did land a unit, it wasn't without a price shock of its own as GameStop was selling as bundles. So, yeah I ended up with maybe a couple of games that I would rather not have bought up front and they were pretty close to full retail price. This was all very, very frustrating. Sony knows I have years of history with them going back to PS3 era. They could throw me a freakin' bone and let me reserve a spot in a queue, even if it was in agreement with a 3rd party retailer - I'd be cool with that. They could manage this situation so much better. // Not to mention that once I got my unit, the storage evaporated almost immediately. PS5s hold about 5 or 6 "large games" at a time!

photochemsyn 4y ago

Reading the article, this seems to be the core issue: > “When your browser checks out an item on a retail site, it sends ‘requests’ to the site’s server. These requests are basically commands that tell the server what to do. Add this item to the cart, submit my order, and so on,” they wrote. “We send those commands associated with checking out to the servers of sites we automate without requiring a browser. Basically, we can mimic what a human does, stripping out the unnecessary lags and delays of a browser.” > "The service is optimized for Target, Best Buy, Amazon, and Walmart." This is hardly just game consoles, the whole baby formula problem is similarly gamed: https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2022/05/13/baby-formula-shortage-bots-snap-up-inventory/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurendebter/2022/05/13/baby-fo... Basically, if you see a shortage anywhere in the consumer/retail goods market, you can use a pool of capital to buy up all the remaining product as quickly as possible - assuming you have access to a pool of capital. This is the same kind of thing that happens in wartime scarcity, the only difference between this and say WWII is the bot technology being used. Now you're the sole supplier and can jack up prices and earn huge percentages. The resellers are just little black market manipulators, in other words, and the bot writers are their facilitators. However, the main sources of product are the big corporate retailers, Amazon etc. They can't jack up the prices themselves (well, they can to some extent as current 'inflation' price hikes are resulting in record profits), but do they really care if automated bots are placing orders? Are they going to write bot-detecting software that might reduce the amount of orders being placed online? Why would they, that would reduce revenue. It's not too surprising that this situation has come about, it's basically monopolistic manipulation of markets throughout the whole supply chain. A deregulated neoliberal paradise has many similarities to a war zone economy.

mdasen 4y ago
> current 'inflation' price hikes are resulting in record profits This is misinformation. Walmart's net income is down 25% year-over-year. Target's is down 41% year-over-year. Excluding the $7.6B Rivian Automotive loss, Amazon's net income went from $8.1B to $0.04B, down 99.5% year-over-year. That loss would have been larger if AWS wasn't doing so extremely well on growth - AWS operating income was up 57% year-over-year. North America retail went from $3.45B operating income to a $1.568B operating loss. International retail went from $1.252B operating income to $1.281B operating loss. I think a lot of people look at revenue (which will go up with inflation) rather than income (which is what is left over when you take out the costs). As costs rise faster than retail can raise their prices, margins are getting squeezed. Consumers have an idea of what a product should cost in their heads and it takes time for that to get un-stuck. There's a reason that retail stocks tanked 9 days ago - investors saw Walmart's earnings on the 17th and Target's on the 18th. They weren't raking in profits. Inflation was squeezing them.

throwaway675309 4y ago

Is there a reason that retailers for certain hot commodities don't just require a unique credit card coupled with a unique shipping address to effectively limit a customer to one item? Have this restriction automatically lift after two weeks from the last purchase for that particular customer so that they can buy another one if sufficient time has elapsed. I'm baffled because it feels like this would instantaneously fix the scalping problem and it's not particularly difficult to implement.

sapienwastey 4y ago
There are services which give you a one time CC number such as privacy.com. I'm unsure how shipping address might also get similarly obsfucated (po boxes?).
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  If you’ve ever dealt with e-commerce or checkout you know that there are a lot of ways to write the same address, and it isn’t easy to know when it is the same address. As an example I lived in a building that had boxes for mail and unit numbers that differed (I think it was for privacy or something, but you could put both or just one and the mail would get there). So a package going to Unit 1A or Box 28 were going to the same place. Add in the fact that there are multiple ways to write this out: #1A, Apt. 1A, Apartment 1A, 1A, Suite 1A Then you can game the box: PMB 28, #28, bx28. Then you can start gaming the names: F Middle Last, First Middle, Last First. Make up a name, or use someone else’s. Anything you assume about addresses probably has an exception. And then, yes, there are private mailbox services that will just receive packages on your behalf.
pg_bot 4y ago
This is likely a losing strategy, while it would likely work for a little while people will find a way to circumvent the restriction. The simpler way to get around scalping/arbitrage is to raise prices so that those who are producing the product are the beneficiaries of the higher price. They can then turn around and tell customers that they are taking that revenue and putting it back into producing more widgets. However, there are certain industries where a lack of supply and rewarding middlemen is actually part of the business strategy. In fashion, entertainment, and luxury goods there is a certain cachet in obtaining items that other people cannot.

causality0 4y ago

If manufacturers were actually interested in quashing resellers they could bind the console to a specific user account during the order process, say for three or six months.

lamontcg 4y ago

> Manufactured scarcity is crucial to a bot’s notoriety, says a person who knows the sneaker industry and asked to remain anonymous for employment concerns. It lets us imagine the sea of PS5s that could be ours, if only we could breach through that locked door. “Creating FOMO is part of the business plan,” the person says. Are you a programmer that wants some internet fame and name notoriety? Write an open source bot that is free for everyone to use which duplicates these kinds of features, but is geared more towards the average person who just wants to score a single ps/5. Flood the bot market with competition.

tragiclos 4y ago
While I would certainly welcome such a project, I wonder if a truly open source bot would be hampered by the fact that online retailers could view the source and proactively circumvent whatever strategy it implements.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  But if they wanted to stop scalpers they could do it trivially by limiting purchases per credit card or address or whatever. Seems more likely that they don't care.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure they could look at their web requests and stop the proprietary bots almost just as easily.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  Would they? If you just send requests to Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, whatever for "check if item is in stock, if yes buy" and loop once a minute why would the retailer implement something to stop you?
brokenodometer 4y ago
Exist(ted) for GPUs, unsure if it still works. https://github.com/Hari-Nagarajan/fairgame https://github.com/Hari-Nagarajan/fairgame

Rasbora 4y ago

I wrote a blog post about this exact problem half a year ago, specifically going into detail about the proxy networks scalpers use, and how to detect them: https://rasbora.dev/blog/detecting-residential-proxy-networks https://rasbora.dev/blog/detecting-residential-proxy-network...