Is scalping Steam trading cards a thing?

[Artificial Idiot]

Today, I wanted to check the price of a trading card I wanted to buy, for which I had placed an order.
I was shocked to see a single user buying up tens of trading cards from the same exact user and then reselling them at a much higher price.
I canceled my order on said trading card and purchased what's left to avoid a huge price spike.

I'm making this post because I couldn't find anyone talking about it.

Other keywords: Remarketing, Steam Community Market, card, foil, auction, order, pre-order, scalp

[Artificial Idiot]

Origineel geplaatst door Wolfpig:

Origineel geplaatst door Artificial Idiot:

Let me emphasize that a SINGLE user bought multiple of the SAME trading card, and RESELLING them at a higher price.

And?
A lot of people might think that that is a good idea........ but it only works out if someone buys it for their price.

Scalping is obviously unethical. Take game merchandises & the PS5 for example.

Isn't Steam strict when it comes to rate-limiting users?
While I don't think a ToS update would solve these issues, I think having captcha would stop suspected bot behavior on the Steam community market.
It's wasting resources on everyone's end after all.

Edit: Grammar.

[Crazy Tiger]

Whether scalping is unethical is questionable, since ethics aren't set in stone in that regard. It's merely the free market being at work, long live capitalism, right? As said, seems like standard supply/demand at work.

Why would Valve step in here? Nothing that actually is wrong is happening.

[D. Flame]

Origineel geplaatst door Crazy Tiger:

Whether scalping is unethical is questionable, since ethics aren't set in stone in that regard. It's merely the free market being at work, long live capitalism, right? As said, seems like standard supply/demand at work.

Why would Valve step in here? Nothing that actually is wrong is happening.

It’s not only unethical, it also violates Steams ToS.

[Chika Ogiue]

Origineel geplaatst door Blood:

The point is extra money for the devs.

The real point is extra money for Valve. This is why they don't need to make games anymore.

[sfnhltb]

Seems fine to me, whenever I sell a card I have two possible sets of buyers to sell to - either the people that want to buy it to use it/keep it, or the people that want to buy it to resell it higher. Either gets the card I don't want off my hands, I don't care what happens to it after that.

[JPMcMillen]

Origineel geplaatst door Artificial Idiot:

Today, I wanted to check the price of a trading card I wanted to buy, for which I had placed an order.
I was shocked to see a single user buying up tens of trading cards from the same exact user and then reselling them at a much higher price.
I canceled my order on said trading card and purchased what's left to avoid a huge price spike.

I'm making this post because I couldn't find anyone talking about it.

Other keywords: Remarketing, Steam Community Market, card, foil, auction, order, pre-order, scalp

It's one of the reasons why the marketplace has seller fees, it's so that you can't buy something for one price and try to resell it for just a little bit more. You have to increase the price by enough so you make more than you spent, which is likely to drive away buyers, especially those that aren't in a hurry. Eventually it leads to a scalper stuck with tons of cards they can't get rid of.

Another problem is that for most Steam trading cards they lose their value pretty fast. Eventually you'll have tons of sellers looking to dump cards and will just take whatever the current highest bid offer is. That eventually whittles down the average selling price to one well below what the scalper even paid for the card originally. This is especially true when you have people buying/crafting booster packs looking for Foil cards, because they will flood the market with all the regular cards they get, usually looking to sell fast to make back what they spent on the booster packs so they can try to get more of them.

Essentially, it's not a great way to make any real money. And if you are patient, the prices will almost always come down.