Always gotta mess with a good thing.
I’ve always wanted Steam gift cards. Gift cards are cool. Sometimes I’m feeling generous, and want to give people things. Anyone else ever get that feeling? $20 generous, not $60-and-conversion generous. They can save up their present money like every other kid at Christmas. And I’ve always thought that the Steam wallet should be able to function that way. I don’t need to put money in my own Steam wallet in case I want to buy things. I have a credit card. It does that too.
So with the introduction of the Steam Marketplace beta, I thought Ah, progress at last! The Steam wallet would be, at last, useful. For something.
Alas for me and my short seeing ways.
Valve Corporation has decided to reorganize the ‘The International 2013’ Dota 2 tournament with an expected prize pool of more than a million dollars. The sixteen best international Dota 2 teams will compete in this offline gaming event at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.
Tickets are sold exclusively on the Dota 2 store and priced at $49.99 USD, the same as last year. Ticketholders are granted access to the event venue for the entirety of the three day tournament from August 7-11.
Well, things have gotten a little messy this year.
Valve released its Legendary Tournament tickets earlier this morning in the Dota 2 store. They went up earlier than expected and were released in batches for an hour. During this hour-long period, access to the store was fraught with hang ups and technical difficulties.
Since this morning, the Dota 2 Steam Marketplace has been flooded with resellers of the prized event tickets, (since each ticket must be activated from in-game backpack before it is consumed and registered on the Steam account.) From the original $50, it has since more than quadrupled in price, to about $230 by my last check.
Yikes. Argue all you like for the joys of marketplace freedom, the rules of scarcity, and your own definition of fair, it is not in a company’s good business to enable people to do this. There is a reason why eBay insists on capping the resale of concert tickets at the original price and a reason why scalpers are shady business. You’re enabling people to rip other people off, and that’s all there is to it.
Not my cup of tea, thanks.
UPDATE: All Steam Marketplace listings for the Legendary Tournament tickets have been removed. Action in, at most, 24 hours. Not bad, Valve.
Published: May 7, 2013 11:00 pm