The PlayStation Portal has sold out, so scalpers are swooping in

Two days after its official launch, the PlayStation Portal had already sold-out. And you know what that means, don't you? Scalpers are already coming in to gobble what's left of the carcass. Listings with outrageous asking prices seem to already be coming out everywhere.

The Portal's retail price is around 200$ (or 220€ in Europe), that is if you bought it on Sony's PlayStation store or at many retailers around the world. But that was when it was still available, on eBay at the moment the Portal is being sold for an average of 300-350 EUR (or 300$), which is almost two times its original price, a few days ago.

Unfortunately, we have seen this happening again and again in the last few years, not only with hardware such as the PlayStation 5 and its original scarcity, but also with games. With physical editions becoming more and more a rarity, and collector's editions being sold in limited quantities, scalpers seem to be ready to gobble them up only to resell them at higher prices.

Ticket concerts are often a target for scalpers as well, especially for big artists such as Taylor Swift. Some reports indicate that in 2022, 83% of traffic towards sites which sell concert tickets seemed to come from automation, which indicate bots that would just buy all tickets available, so they could be sold later.

Still, there are ways to fight against scalpers, but those have to come from producers and manufacturers, rather than from buyers. For example, Valve now requires a Steam account in "good standing" to be able to place an order for the new Steam Deck OLED.

So far, Sony doesn't seem interested in adopting any countermeasures, but if they want to continue keeping customers happy, the company definitely has to start fighting against such unethical practices. But, in this case, do you really need an accessory device that connects to your console and lets you play games through Wi-Fi? Nah, we didn't think so.