As Concord crashes, bootleggers are flooding eBay, charging up to $25,000 for physical copies of the PS5 edition—and some are spending hundreds.
Forget Oasis tickets, the real goldmine of the season has just come out. It’s, er, Concord. Yes, the doomed hero shooter from Firewalk Studios that Sony is unceremoniously pulling the plug on tomorrow.
News of the game’s impending demise has given a major boost to bootleggers, who have begun flooding auction sites like eBay with ridiculously expensive PS5 copies of the $40 game. How expensive? Well, who wants to shell out $25,000 for a disc? No? Can I tempt you with $950? How about $500?
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I know what you are thinking: these are just fortune hunters trying their luck. Nobody is actually buying copies of this thing at these absurdly inflated prices. They are kind of right. Sure, nobody is buying Concord for $25,000 (yet), but a quick look at eBay’s sold listings shows someone pays too much.
For example, at least one redneck has shelled out $150 for a copy of the game, a full 375% of the game’s original price. It’s easy to find other listings of the game for sale for $140, $130, and basically anywhere around $100 and up. While that’s not several thousand dollars, it’s still too much in my opinion, especially for a game that may soon be extinct.
It’s happening here in Blighty too. On eBay in the UK, there are listings for the game ranging from £100 to £10,000 (via TheGamer), the latter listing also having a poop emoji in the title, which makes me doubt its legitimacy. “PULLED OFF THE SHELF, RARE,” the listings scream, hoping to entice customers to spend a significant chunk of their wages on it.
If I had to hazard a guess about buyers’ motivations, I’d probably say it’s not an overwhelming love of Concord that’s driving them to buy the game in its final hours. Most of the expensive listings boast that the merchandise is in its original packaging and “in hand”: eBay slang for merchandise the seller actually has in their possession and not hoarded in some dropshipping warehouse. I’d wager that the sales are a mix of bootleggers setting up fake sales to drive up the price and people buying copies in the hope that one day they’ll be worth thousands — dare I say millions — of dollars like a mint-condition Super Mario Bros cart.
Which, to be clear, is not going to happen. I have no special insight, and maybe in 20 years’ time, when we are ruled by a caste of robber barons who enriched themselves by hoarding copies of a dead hero shooter, I will be pretty embarrassed. Still, I’m pretty sure that anyone who spends three-figure sums or more on a copy of Concord will regret it.
