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There’s nothing quite so validating as your favorite IP getting merchandise. Consumerism is at the heart of everything after all, and having the opportunity to spend money on a hunk of plastic molded into the shape of an anime girl or a metaphor for how war is bad is the ultimate sign that your franchise, unlike other figureless franchises, has made it.
It’s even gotten better over time, as many of these figures look even better- the Ningguang scale figure from Genshin Impact is an objective work of art, and the upcoming Pop Up Parade Guts from Berserk is the perfect remedy for people who want the progenitor of Dark Souls but don’t fancy spending thousands on something from Prime 1.
Gatekeep Scalpers
Yet despite all that, even consumerism isn’t free from bad actors. In what feels like a movement catalyzed by the pandemic, scalpers have creeped further into “geek” scenes, and it seems like every pre order announcement is now a battlefield as you compete against some jerk who probably used all the money they saved on showering to make sure to buy out any stock in hopes of making a quick buck from desperate consumers.
We’ve seen it affect multiple hobbies, most prominently trading cards. For years now the Pokemon TCG has had a scalper problem, due largely in part to the prominence of easily accessible appraisal tools. Who cares about Pokemon TCG as a hobby, when there’s a quick buck to be made instead?
I don’t actually hate the secondary market, I just think that it’s something that absolutely deserves to be gatekept. Sure, you could argue spending 50 USD on a piece of cardboard is a ripoff, but at least the people ripping each other off are a closed circuit of fans, who all do believe that what they’re trading is worth its price.
Instead with the scalpers you have people who haven’t bought into the hallucination, but are eager to make money off the people who have. Overseas you still have valuable items like booster boxes having to be limited like they were toilet paper in the summer of 2020. I kind of wish the internet could focus long enough to take their anger at supposed “fake gamer girls” and direct it here instead- here’s your fake fans, turning your beloved hobby into a cash cow.
It wasn’t just trading cards- Gunpla, model kits based on Mobile Suit Gundam has also been hard hit by scalpers. It’s hard to enforce buy limits on gunpla too, since kitbashing is such a prominent part of the hobby that a guy holding 5 boxes of HG Zakus might actually be a hobbyist, not a jerk looking to sell them at a markup.
Killing The Mood
What absolutely guts me about the scalper situation is how it kills the mood of any announcement. What should have been excitement for yesterday’s Hololive EN plushies was instead met with a nervous panic, as if Vtuber fans had suddenly been told that being a simp isn’t a personality trait.
Indeed, Hololive fans are no strangers to the scalping problem- the Gawr Gura Nendoroid broke the Good Smile Company’s website, and they had to do a second made-to-order run of pre orders because too many people were trying to buy a chibi shark girl, presumably to resell at a later date.
With that trauma fresh in their minds, reactions to the Hololive EN Plushies were pretty much the same- excitement, but with a dash of fear that even if the plushies were made to order, that they wouldn’t be able to get theirs in time due to the scalper problem.
Here To Stay
Unfortunately, I don’t think the scalper situation is going to go away. As proven by the ongoing success of gacha games, so-called “geeks” are high on money and low on common sense, and I’m sure there totally exist fans who would happily pay triple just to have a Gawr Gura Nendoroid, lest their clear jars get lonely.
It’s not exactly something you can turn a blind eye too, either: the PS5 continues to be trapped in what I can only assume is some kind of techno purgatory, with component shortages partially driven by jerks trying to make money off of electronic Monopoly cash and what few PS5s do get made being sold to robots who then try to sell it on Shopee at a markup so high you could pay an intern with it and be praised for progressive hiring practices.
Like your friend still talking about how cool they were running track in high school, the game industry does eventually need to move on. Game development needs to be able to think about what they could do fully immersed in the next generation, without shooting their own games in the foot because they needed to make a version that could run on a console people owned.
Is there a solution in sight? I doubt so. While it’s nice to think of geeks all along the world holding hands to reject scalpers, the truth of the matter is there will always be buyers, which means, unfortunately, there will always be sellers.
