It can be easy for people to dislike the secondary market if they aren’t the ones selling into it. Commonly referred to as “scalpers”, the fact is that the secondary market is a very important part of the economy. It’s how goods retain some of their value, for instance. And when goods are sold several times, this naturally feeds into the economy and tax revenue for the country. It can also be a fantastic indicator of pricing efficiency in the primary market. For instance, if a good is bought and able to be resold very quickly on the secondary market for more than the original price, that can be an indicator for the original producer that they can consider pricing their goods higher.
But if you suddenly can’t afford a limited good because of its cost on the secondary market, that can certainly be aggravating. And apparently sometimes the original producer of the product can be annoyed on fans’ behalf as well. That is the case with one Larian director who is very mad at “scalpers” for selling Baldur’s Gate 3 Collector’s Edition copies at ten times the original price.
This was brought to stark attention by Larian’s publishing director Michael Douse, who tweeted (exxed?) to express his disgust at the listings he was finding online.
“Hate scalpers, man,” he wrote on X. “I understand how commodity works, but this CE isn’t a commodity it’s designed to make someone happy not rich.”
Now, frankly, the rest of that Kotaku post is likewise filled with a bunch of empty-calorie remarks on how bad “scalpers” are and how everything about this entire situation sucks and blah, blah, blah. Whether the author was merely attempting to toss red meat to readers or simply has a profound misunderstanding of what the secondary market is and does is of no material importance to me. I’d much rather focus on some very correct and key points that same author makes.
The main thrust of Douse’s complaint above is about people who bought the Collector’s Edition primarily to trade it, not because they’re some superfan or whatever. In other words, according to this complaint, the problem is that people looking to make money off the Collector’s Edition are buying it and creating scarcity for the everyday fan, thereby driving the price up to a point where most of those fans cannot afford it, or at least have to buy it at a highly inflated price. Now try to square that complaint with the entire existence of a Collector’s Edition in the first place.
It’s a situation that’s created by the artificial scarcity of the object in the first place, where a company deliberately doesn’t make as much of something as there are people who want to buy it, then price that thing at far more than it costs to make (because, that’s how commerce works) to reduce the number of people who’ll find it within their means.
If it were mass produced, it presumably wouldn’t be a “Collector’s” version (whatever that actually means—“I’ve collected all one of this Baldur’s Gate 3 boxed version!”), but then it would be available for everyone who wants it at the recommended price. And scalpers wouldn’t have a market to exploit.
Exactly! If Douse and Larian would like to rid the world of inflated prices for Collector’s Editions, let them go first. The call, as the saying goes, is coming from inside the house. Larian created this entire secondary market through its own decisions on production quantities for a special version of the product it chose to make. And, to be clear, it can absolutely do every bit of that without any complaint from me.
But then those same people that created the secondary market should probably stop whining about how it operates.