Forget Oasis tickets, this season's real gold-dust item just dropped. It's, uh, Concord. Yes, the doomed hero shooter from Firewalk Studios that Sony is unceremoniously yanking the plug on tomorrow.
News of the game's imminent demise has been blood in the water to scalpers, who have begun to flood auction sites like eBay with ludicrously expensive PS5 copies of the $40 game. How expensive? Well, who fancies forking over $25,000 for a disc? No? Can I tempt you with $950? How about $500?
Now, I know what you're thinking: These are just chancers trying their luck. No one's actually buying copies of this thing at these absurdly inflated prices. You're kind of right. Sure, nobody is picking up Concord for $25K (yet), but a brief glance at eBay's sold listings reveals someone is paying too much.
For instance, at least one rube has forked over $150 for a copy of the game, fully 375% of the game's original price. It's easy to find other sold listings of the game at $140, $130, and really just everywhere around and north of $100. It's not several thousand dollars, but it's still too much to pay, if you ask me, especially for a game that could be going the way of the dodo.
It's happening here in Blighty, too. UK eBay contains listings for the game at anywhere from £100 to £10,000 (via TheGamer), though that latter listing also has a poop emoji in the title, leading me to question its seriousness. "PULLED FROM SHELVES, RARE," scream the listings, hoping to tempt punters into dropping an appreciable portion of their paycheques.
Were I to hazard a guess at buyers' motivations, I'd probably say it's not an overwhelming love of Concord that's driving them to pick the game up in its twilight hours. Most of the pricey listings brag that the ware is in its original shrink-wrap and "in-hand": eBay-speak for goods that the seller actually has in their possession, rather than squirrelled away at some dropshipping warehouse. I'd wager the sales are mix of scalpers ginning up fake sales to push up the price and people buying copies in the hope that they'll one day become like a mint-condition Super Mario Bros cart, worth thousands—dare I say millions—of dollars.
Which, to be clear, will not happen. I don't have any special insight, and perhaps 20 years from now, when we're ruled over by a caste of robber-barons who got rich off hoarded copies of a dead hero shooter, I'll have some serious egg on my face. Nevertheless, I feel reasonably confident saying anyone spending three or more digits on a copy of Concord will regret it.
