alt Hacker NewsScalping provides the service of exchanging money for time, means, and/or luck. People who have no time to camp, no botting tools or skills, etc can exchange their money instead.
Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market.
Even in this case, there will be scalpers providing for people with more money than luck, who want a day one steam machine.
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>Scalping provides the service of exchanging money for time, means, and/or luck. People who have no time to camp, no botting tools or skills, etc can exchange their money instead.
Which, again, hurts both the seller and the vast majority of the buyers.
>Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market.
>Even in this case, there will be scalpers providing for people with more money than luck, who want a day one steam machine.
Scalpers, the vast majority of the time, deal with markets with non-artificial restrictions, and use them to their advantage. In this case, Valve has very intentionally designed a system to prevent scalpers because they want people to have a fair chance of getting a product that is very much not artificially restricted. Valve is free to sell to whoever they want, consumers are free to purchase from Valve, and scalpers are in the middle, exploiting the system for profit, and willingly or not pushing for DRM and for binding accounts to devices.
> People who have no time to camp, no botting tools or skills, etc can exchange their money instead.
But they only need to do that because of the scalpers! The scalpers aren't adding value, they're adding friction and expecting people to pay extra for it!
> Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market.
In which way do you see the market for Steam Machines to be artificially restricted?
> satisfy market demand
There's not enough sugar in the world to coat that bullshit.
Scalpers aren't providing anything. The product already exists.
I agree, but Im trying to decide what "artificial restrictions...on the market" are and can't come up with anything other than "the problems and solutions occasioned by selling a limited number of items" i.e. distribution problems.
So are scalpers distributors?
Is the onus on the company/market/"all of us" to find "better" (whatever you think "better" is) distribution methods?