Larian Studios has announced Baldur’s Gate 3 will be receiving a physical deluxe edition for PS5, Xbox, and PC next year. And unlike the collector’s edition that arrived months ago in a limited quantity, this one is intended to sit on store shelves for ages to come. However given the presence of deluxe in its name, many cheeky scalpers have already scooped up pre-orders from retailers in the vain hope of making easy money on sites like eBay.
It’s typical scalper behaviour. They hone in on something they know is going to be potentially rare or in demand and gobble up a bunch of units for themselves with the express intention of selling them at a higher margin to real fans who have no other choice but to pay. You see this with the majority of limited and collector’s editions these days, to the point that you must know when and where they’re set to go on sale well in advance (and then get incredibly lucky) to avoid missing out. Bots lurking across several sites also operate on scripts and command a regular Joe has little chance of beating, so more often than not, you’re fighting a losing battle to buy anything.
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Growing up, I’d expect to see rare products and those in heavy demand sell out if I wasn’t on my toes when they came around, but right now it feels like even being on top of everything is still a recipe for getting screwed over. At least I used to get beaten by other fans who got there quicker, not thieving bots.
The biggest modern example of this was the PS5. Anyone who didn’t pre-order and secure a unit months in advance was in for a rough ride. You saw entire websites and YouTube channels become stock updates for most retailers, acting as alarm clocks for anxious consumers hoping that, through a stroke of luck, there would be a small chance to bag a new console at a fair price. The pandemic and component shortages made units rarer than anticipated anyway, but this was on another level entirely. It wasn’t until a year or so after the original launch that stock was normalised, and only now, almost three years on, can you go onto most websites and actually pick up the hardware without any issues.
Family and friends would frequently message me asking when they’d actually be able to buy one, not that they should be in a rush because the damn thing still doesn’t have many good games worth playing. We shouldn’t live in a world where getting our hands on leisure products isn’t prohibitive because of price, but all thanks to losers on the internet happy to game the system for their own gain. Companies aren’t always able to stop this, and artificial scarcity performed by Nintendo with its miniature consoles and limited-release titles like Super Mario 3D All-Stars doesn’t help matters either. It makes it so if you don’t wish to miss out, you need to jump on it right now. In a fairly obvious move, those games are still around and playable, while the fervour we once held for the NES and SNES Mini has long dissipated.
Larian is nipping this obnoxious nonsense in the bud by directly addressing online scalpers and making it evident that, despite being a ‘Deluxe Edition’ and bound to be in high demand across all platforms, the studio has no plans to stop producing stock in the future. If you’re a gamer who wants to get their hands on a physical version of Baldur’s Gate 3, even if it sells out on the first run, all you need to do is bide your time. Nobody is left out to dry except the scalpers who immediately slip into their natural routine, only to be ousted by those behind the product they’re trying to pre-emptively flog to make a quick buck.
Scalpers are only in it for themselves, and Baldur’s Gate 3 has built up a positive, supportive community that isn’t going to let themselves be taken for a ride. Larian won’t either, ensuring all of us that physical copies of the acclaimed RPG will be available for anyone willing to cough up enough pennies. The future of physical media is still an unknown, which will make instances like this more tempting in the eyes of scalpers and collectors, but that doesn’t mean people should be forced to lose out purely because they weren’t in the right place at the right time.