Scalpers are crying about having a bad public image.

[Chimpzy]

The answer is you build them to order.

Go to a website, place an order, you get a number assigned to you. Once that number gets it's turn, that console is yours no matter what.

I'm not sure that's feasible for production at that scale, but let's just assume it is.

That alone would not be enough. You still need a system to actively sus out the scalpers or otherwise regulate the number of orders being made, because a bot can order more units way faster than we can. Cuz if you don't, you end up with millions of backorders, and you might end up having to wait years before the turn for your PS5 or whatever to be produced comes up.

For example, as mentioned by Dwarvenhobble, when Walmart got new stock for the PS5 in december, it received 20 million orders from scalpers in a span of a couple hours. That's more than Sony is expected to sell by the end of 2021, which considering the circumstances is likely close to if not equal to how many they can produce. They did block those orders, so they seem to have measures in place. But still, 20 million, in hours, at just one retailer.

 

[CriticalGaming]

The videogame industry is not a unique example of the abuses that happen under capitalism. There are no isolated incidents. The rot is systemic, every scandal merely a symptom of the moral torpor capitalism encourages, as a variety of people have been asserting for about two hundred years. EA is evil and they will never be punished because they are behaving in accordance with the capitalist system. There is very little point in criticising the actions of individuals or corporations except as case study because without systemic change they will simply be replaced by something other suitably unpleasant entity. Not that they will ever be under much pressure for their genuinely exploitative practices, because gamers are too busy being upset that women and minorities exist. In such a pervasively unjust system I have the choice of mindless conformity or near impotent protest. I chose protest. Jim, too, chose protest. That is what it is to be left wing; to look at how capitalism drags people down and say "no", as loud as you can, even if nobody listens, because we all have a responsibility to each other and part of that is showing other people the truth.

Is it though?

I think it's really easy to point at EA and say they are evil, because of the abuse they issue upon their customers (i don't remember crunch problems but they probably do) and the greed fueled microtransactions. Their reputation for dissolving development studios after buying them up and forcing them to release a bad product. Their constant abuse of the ultimate-team systems in all the sports games.

But at the end of the day.....these practices only occur because of the consumer. Not a single shady business practice can be placed on the shoulders of the publishers alone. It's the customers that fuel this business, the customers that feed the system so much that it becomes a monster and the customer that acts outraged yet somehow continues to feed the creature.

If you feed a child fast food constantly, then one day you realize they've become an unhealthy obese danger, it isn't the child's fault that you continue to feed them fast food thereafter.

Companies exist to make money off of goods and services. And the more money they make the better, not just for them but for all the investors and employees involved. And if lootboxes are the gateway to making the most money you can, then you can't fault them for doing it. You instead have to fault the buying public who feed into that practice. Because if you think the company is supposed to hold a moral standard, because you don't want to blame the public for a lack of responsibility, then you are a fool.

Mcdonald's isn't beholden to any responsibility of making people fat. They simply provide the food and it's the publics job to not make constant unhealthy choices.
Cigarette companies litterally sell people their own death, and yet what responsibility should they hold?

The individual is where capitalism makes it's money, because it is their choice to decide where there money goes.

When a company finds a cash cow, of course they are going to milk it if it can be milked. It's really easy to point at the executives and go, "Oh well, they only push these monetizations to line their already fat greedy pockets." But that isn't entirely true, because bigger revenue also leads to more jobs down low, more development teams, more QA, more janitorial services.

And i know that after that last paragraph you want to instantly point at Activision and how they fire 800 people after a record year. But a record year does not mean they will keep around an underperforming division like the E-sports division just for the sake of it. The jobs generated have to be relevent to the companies future plans. Which wasn't the case with Activision.

Does all that mean that the "greedy" practices are right? No.

But yelling at the company isn't going to change things. Change has to come from the people, and it has to come from not buying into the "greedy" system. If the microtransaction revenue dried up, you best believe they would stop showing up in future products.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I think something has fucked him up (likely getting sued by Digital Homicide) that caused him to have some sort of breakdown.

Maybe it's how people keep screaming for him to "expose" the "bad" companies like EA and Ubisoft, but when he finds "good" companies like CDPR being just as rotten, they tell him to kill himself. I know trying to wrap my mind around that kind of corporate-dicksucking doublethink gives me headaches.

 

[Houseman]

Maybe it's how people keep screaming for him to "expose" the "bad" companies like EA and Ubisoft, but when he finds "good" companies like CDPR being just as rotten, they tell him to kill himself. I know trying to wrap my mind around that kind of corporate-dicksucking doublethink gives me headaches.

Does he really care what people think about him? I mean, c'mon.

 

[BrawlMan]

Whatever is going on with Jim, as long as they're happy and not harming others, I don't care. I've seen way weirder and dumber things on the Internet. No matter how they address the situation, it does not invalidate (which some people on this thread have been doing) what he is pointing out wrong with the gaming industry and capitalism in general. Especially those abuse and exploits the system without a care for cosequnences unless it affects them personally or someone they give a rat's ass about. Jim's fan base defintely don't seem to mind.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

The videogame industry is not a unique example of the abuses that happen under capitalism. There are no isolated incidents. The rot is systemic, every scandal merely a symptom of the moral torpor capitalism encourages, as a variety of people have been asserting for about two hundred years. EA is evil and they will never be punished because they are behaving in accordance with the capitalist system. There is very little point in criticising the actions of individuals or corporations except as case study because without systemic change they will simply be replaced by something other suitably unpleasant entity. Not that they will ever be under much pressure for their genuinely exploitative practices, because gamers are too busy being upset that women and minorities exist. In such a pervasively unjust system I have the choice of mindless conformity or near impotent protest. I chose protest. Jim, too, chose protest. That is what it is to be left wing; to look at how capitalism drags people down and say "no", as loud as you can, even if nobody listens, because we all have a responsibility to each other and part of that is showing other people the truth.

No doubt there is corruption, exploitation, greed incentivizing, etc. One of the biggest SMH thoughts is the waste factor too, personally. The planet itself doesn’t suffer nearly as icy as the living things calling it their only home.

Having said that, there needs to also be incremental, systematic steps take towards repairing the, well, system. Anything else will lead to collapse and catastrophe for millions of people. People will always desire upward mobility, and the spirit of free enterprise has led to countless, often synergistic benefits, including ways to help people, which has historically been perhaps especially true regarding immigrants.

However, it doesn’t help that our elite leaders, both political and corporate, are too often little more than corrupt individuals seeking power over others in the first place. Government was supposed to be a voluntary endeavor, to serve the people, not taking advantage of the populace so these leaders” can make lucrative careers out of it. That governmental expansion has a codependency with increasing population which exacerbates the various kinds of damage meanwhile is the ultimate inconvenient truth, but that’s digressing.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

I am a patient gamer. I was not going to buy the PS5 at launch until official exclusives not named Godfall had dropped. But fuck scalpers they are like greasiest crossover of capitalism and mercantilism and they should know they are greezy at least own up to it.

I am mostly mad cause while I am cool not having a new console at this junction I think of all the kids who missed out on hype console christmas or birthday or people who were really psyched to add one to the collection.

Forced scarity for something already in the 600 dollars range and mark it up may you be subject to eternal prison of nails on a chalk board.

I think part of it is they've come from the designer / special edition trainer / sneaker market.

Yes a lot of the present scalpers and groups were doing this with special limited edition variant shoes, which I can't imagine is that much of a market nor is it one that gets that mad about not getting stuff because it's almost entirely status symbol stuff with no practical use as people (assuming they're sane) aren't wearing those limited edition shoes and will have other shoes they actually wear and use. With the new consoles it would be like if they suddenly started scalping every phone on the market or scalping the new E-book reader which is the only E-book reader capable of reading some new format.

They didn't expect the backlash because they're idiots who didn't think moving from a vanity item sector to an entertainment item sector would change things when for some people gaming is their primary entertainment.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

And how does one get noticed in order to attract people to their pattreon? You have people in this thread talking about how Jim has a history of doing things to be "lul random" or shocking in the past, I'm just following that through that this is just him trying to further his "brand".

Others said in previous Jim threads that he's been losing his passion for the job, is getting worse at his takes outside of industry standards, and that the variety of his content has gone down. Going this route is the kind of action I would expect from someone in such a situation in order to improve self esteem and reinforce his popular image that makes him stand out among other creators like himself that give takes on events or review things.

I'd just say it's the SRS* / Breadtube esc audience Jim has attracted. Seriously he's said before about his subreddit being toxic and going after him and well they do but it's often being for him not espousing enough "progressive" values or being as vocal about certain stuff. I mean it's entirely possible Jim is Nonbinary Trans or whatever (I don't think even they've decided yet) but the reasoning given of growing up in a society that didn't allow Gender expression in the UK? Yeh no I call BS. No non conforming Gender Expression in the UK?
The UK:
Who has panto dames?
Who had Lily Savage (Paul O'Grady) on TV with Blankety Blank?
Who lead boy in a number of pantos and even some plays is usually Female? (What you thought Deviant art created female Peter Pan?)
The UK that helped in part launch the career of Richard O'Brien as a TV presenter not merely his other best known work The Rocky Horror Picture Show?
The UK where The Rocky Horror Picture Show started in the 1970s?

I dunno I find that claim suspect at best.

Spoiler: *SRS for those who don't know

*For those who don't know SRS stands for Shit Reddit Says and is or was a group dedicated to cleaning up reddit of anyone they declared toxic undesirable and they did this by threatening subreddits to give their members mod positions, filling subreddits they opposed full of awful comments from sockpuppet accounts then immediately running to the admin to to claim the moderators there were dealing with it and using that to push out the existing mods and take over to push their values. They're suspencted to be the group that took over anime memes to ban certain terms there. They're also a group that used to proudly proclaim their actions had helped drive a 16 year old republican girl to suicide and they hoped to drive more undesirables out of life too.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

To be fair to Jim, I don't think this is entirely an act. I think something has fucked him up (likely getting sued by Digital Homicide) that caused him to have some sort of breakdown. Since then he has become ever increasingly bitter towards the games industry but it would actually be more accurate to say that he has become crazed into an anti-capitalism mindset which is coming amongst the progressive and LBGT circles he runs around in.

As a result his content has been consistantly one-note for a while now, harping on the same shit. Even when he did nothing but negative themed videos in the past, the videos would at least have variety to them in terms of targetting Randy Pitchford, EA, Bobby Kotick, whatever. There used to be different focal points to what the topic was about, and now it's just like "All these companies are evil, video games are evil, fuck everyone!" and it's really exaggerated.

The general news reports he used to do are gone, the jimpressions are gone, the OMGHYPE's are gone, his content is almost exclusively Jimquisitons and I for one am no longer a fan which sucks, because I really used to love the Squirty Plays, the Steam Greenlight, and a lot of the content Jim made.

I mean Jim's been fucked up for a long time. I doubt "The Drugs flat" time helped him much, nor the seeming issues round his family growing up if his stories are true. Then again we're talking Jim who got fired after he was accused of wanking in the office of he taxi company he worked for doing dispatches but in Jim's own words "I was fired for allegedly wanking in there, they never proved I was doing it because they never managed to actually catch me when I did decide to have a wank in there." So maybe Jim has just always been a bit messed up. Then again recent events likely haven't helped as he (and I'm guessing his family) moved across the USA to a new city with Justin (his art director) into what was meant to be a temporary flat while Justin and Jim and his family looked for houses to rent but then Covid hit. Also they moved because Jim was trying to progress his accidental wrestling career and had been offered a spot at Chikara wrestling, problem being about 2 weeks after Jim had moved Chikara wrestling as a company collapsed due to numerous sexual abuse allegations meaning the job Jim moved to take up was no longer there for him and so he couldn't move on from or break away from The Jimquisition and covering gaming. (Note: All this is just stuff Jim has said over the years on podcasts or in the Jimquisition itself none of this is some secret stuff dug up by people online it's what he's said publicly over the years)

Honestly I'm shocked Jim hasn't just gone full breadtuber at this point and embraced the just given up being a games industry only channel.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Does he really care what people think about him? I mean, c'mon.

It's likely more that he's angry about how hard-working people in the industry are treated, and how gamers are eager to dump on the "bad" companies doing it but will fight tooth and nail to defend the "good" companies doing it.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

But how do you regulate scalpers? Its not illegal to buy something and re-sell it. It can be shitty, and I hate the practice, but what laws should be put in place that don't just limit the market or have unintended negative consequences?

The problem is it’s a supply and demand loop hole and it needs to be closed. It was obvious the console makers were having shortages as it is, and scalpers only further compounded the problem by buying up and reselling on short stock.

“Oh but my 400% mkup is justified, cuz dare’s shortijez!!” they’d say. Sorry dickheads; you know how this game works, so don’t act surprised when people call you out on it. This coming from someone who did the same thing at PS2 launch.
A. I only bought two though, and sold one to (partially) pay for the other I kept
B. My starting bid prices on eBay in general are always a fraction of retail value because screw higher bid fees.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Note: Forum is being weird about accepting multiple quote replies hence individual posts, sorry for this

Not that they will ever be under much
-Snip-
as you can, even if nobody listens, because we all have a responsibility to each other and part of that is showing other people the truth.

yeh no.

As some-one who once wrote a piece cited by Jason Schreier as the source that started his investigated for one of his pieces about some abuse in the games industry, for those wondering it's this piece https://kotaku.com/microsoft-is-late-on-paying-xbox-indie-developers-agai-1666323327 from Jason. yeh no Gamers haven't been too busy. Mostly we've been too busy having to fight through bullshit claims that we only hated whatever because it has women and minorities in it. Like the fact people can't seem to accept that The Last of Us Part II wasn't a well written story, if you want to see the same themes done better just go watch Hell on Wheels. You think the whole "Revenge is bad" theme is executed well in The Last of Us Part II you've not seen nearly an hour long episode that is a prorogued fight between two enemies in a desert and each gets more injured and struggle more and more to carry on, one of which is a character whose been a villain and you've wanted to see revenge but watching it go down it's a case of "Not like this, you didn't want this, this drawn out slugfest, it's not swift, it's not styling, it's deliberately ugly and unpleasant."

But hey plenty of the gaming press were fast to look past the crunch at Naughty Dog and to attack what was perceived as it's competition (Ghost of Tsushima) which was attacked a being supportive of Japanese right wing myths and imperialism because it shows the idea of fighting against the Mongols, which is bad because later Japan invaded them back and instead should be about making peace with them or something.

Hell some publications back in the day even pushed EA's claim the backlash to Mass Effect 3 was due to homophobia, a claim EA wheeled out again to try and explain when they won worst company in America 2 years running.

It would probably shock some people to know that one of the first games with a Black female protagonist (Outside of some movie licence games I'm not aware of) was on the PS1, an era when gaming basically was still learning how to do 3D and had barely moved much past anthropomorphic animals as protagonists the game was Urban Chaos, but no sure gaming has this big problem with minority protagonists and they're totally not being used as a way to try and deflect criticism and by some studios to just stop ideologically driven journalists wanting to call them out because "They're the good guys they're on our side look they're putting diverse protagonists into their games".

No far better to do to a piece about how great Gears of War is for having 32 different gender identity flags people can use only (out of 48 total flag options) than call it out of poor monitisation practices. The publication gets to pretend to be the good guys while not upsetting the company by not having to call out their bullshit.

If this were about representation and not merely chasing clicks and sucking up to big companies with plenty of money you'd have found some publications happily celebrating Paladins adding Imani
But Paladins doesn't have the name recognition of advertising budgets and money behind it that Overwatch does so of course publications don't bother because why point out the rival game to Overwatch is doing representation better than Overwatch has and given people what Overwatch fans have been demanding?

 

[Bedinsis]

But how do you regulate scalpers? Its not illegal to buy something and re-sell it. It can be shitty, and I hate the practice, but what laws should be put in place that don't just limit the market or have unintended negative consequences?

I have a suggestion for a simple solution, which is so simple that I suspect someone will say why it is impossible or tell me that it is already in practice and apparently not sufficient:

Use a test to see if the user is a bot or a human. CAPTCHA, or those "I'm not a robot"-tickboxes, or those image machine learning tests, or something else entirely that bots cannot do yet.

 

[SilentPony]

I have a suggestion for a simple solution, which is so simple that I suspect someone will say why it is impossible or tell me that it is already in practice and apparently not sufficient:

Use a test to see if the user is a bot or a human. CAPTCHA, or those "I'm not a robot"-tickboxes, or those image machine learning tests, or something else entirely that bots cannot do yet.

That's utterly impossible! Not even Star Trek with their space magic can make a test to tell if someone is a robot or human

 

[Bedinsis]

That's utterly impossible! Not even Star Trek with their space magic can make a test to tell if someone is a robot or human

Are you suggesting it wouldn't work or making a pop culture reference I'm not understanding? After all, Star Trek is fictional, whereas I exist in the real world, where I occasionally encounter bot-tests on the Internet.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Are you suggesting it wouldn't work or making a pop culture reference I'm not understanding? After all, Star Trek is fictional, whereas I exist in the real world, where I occasionally encounter bot-tests on the Internet.

I mean, in this particular case, some bot were using the site backend to skip ahead of the credit card verification stage and pass by the capcha entirely.

 

[Elijin]

How hard is it to use someone's requested pronouns? It's not costing you anything to do.

 

[Houseman]

How hard is it to use someone's requested pronouns? It's not costing you anything to do.

About as hard as it is for you to mind your own business, I'd imagine.

 

[Gergar12]

But how do you regulate scalpers? Its not illegal to buy something and re-sell it. It can be shitty, and I hate the practice, but what laws should be put in place that don't just limit the market or have unintended negative consequences?

I would legit go crazy and tie to a national id. One per person, or two per person.

 

[Houseman]

I would legit go crazy and tie to a national id. One per person, or two per person.

And then tie that to voter registration. Boom, two problems solved at once.