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Thanks for making this thread, triple sulk. I see a lot of parallels between what Rudy is doing, and the most common types of exploitation we see in the stock trading thread. With stocks, what you see is: a niche, thinly-traded stock with a low price. Someone with some money (say, a million dollars or so) buys in big. This action causes the price to spike. Then, they encourage other people to buy in, predicting a big increase in the price: this is the pump part. Then, because their own actual transactions are essentially secret, the initial buyer sells while the public is buying, divesting themselves of the junk while the hype is peaking. This is the dump part. Once all the marks have put in their money, there's nobody left buying, and they're all looking for the "peak" to sell at: their shares go up for sale, the initial buyer has already bilked them of their money, there's nobody buying at these inflated prices, and the price crashes again. Pump-and-dump happens daily to dozens of unlisted ("pink sheets") over the counter stocks, and fairly frequently with low-price exchange listed stocks ("penny stocks"). What we have here is a niche game most people haven't heard of; a limited availability of playing pieces; a single investor who has the finances and access to take huge stakes nobody else can take, at prices lower than anyone else can get; and then a direct sales pitch from that guy, encouraging other "investors" to take advantage; and all within the context of a marketplace of collectors-items where other more "legit" long-term game pieces have shown sustained increases in value over the course of decades (most notably Magic, but also to a lesser but still significant degree, Pokemon and perhaps a few others). It's understandable why some people think this is the Next Big Thing. FOMO reigns. Just like with pump-and-dump stocks, grifts like this exploit the greed (and desperation) of people who already missed out before, and have a strong sense that the "smart people" are becoming wealthy by engaging in "smart" trading of "investments" with very limited publicity, while all the normal people who aren't in the know spend their lives as wage-slaves. I think we can be sympathetic to the mindset of folks who missed out on owning a few packs of Alpha/Beta/etc. of Magic, missed out on owning a few thousand Bitcoins when they were pennies each, missed out on buying a bunch of Gamestop stock when it was a few dollars each, but now, this time, finally, they've got a shot at getting in on the ground floor. There are powerful incentives and a stark lack of regulatory oversight, plus charismatic sales pitches and all the trappings of exclusivity and the exciting feeling of sharing in an exclusive opportunity with other very smart people who are in-the-know. But it's a grift. It has all the hallmarks. The guy who is selling thousands of packs of cardboard for a thousand dollars each is not your friend and he is not offering you an exclusive opportunity to get rich quick. He is not a Good Guy. He is not generously sharing his great fortune with his friends. Please don't fall for this sort of thing.
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Oct 13, 2021 18:27
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:36 |
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In the world of stocks and finance, a very common practice is for analysts to disclose positions they have - or clearly state they have no position and will not be opening one - in any stock or investment vehicle they discuss. "I have 1000 shares of this stock" adds a critical context to a buy, hold, or sell recommendation, or a prediction of future price action, etc. Anyone taking an interest in the buying/selling/investment/etc. side of this or any other TCG should demand the same level of disclosure from the talking heads on their social media platforms. Not that they can't just nakedly lie about it of course, but it's hard to participate in a marketplace like this one totally anonymously at scale, so it's unlikely a prominent commentator could be trading tens of thousands of dollars of product without someone figuring out that hey, this is someone who said on their podcast that they're not doing that!
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Oct 13, 2021 19:44
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Yeah a corollary to the disclosure part is that you ignore the advice of anyone who has a significant position because it's obviously a conflict of interest for them.
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Oct 13, 2021 20:08
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I'm not really calling for government regulation: more just making a comparison, and suggesting strategies for collectors/players/speculators to protect themselves from exploitation. To me, the dividing line for "cool" vs. "not cool" when it comes to a youtuber (or whatever) promoting something is disclosure. I'm more suspicious of people who apparently have a financial stake but aren't disclosing what it is when they promote a product or service; and I'm especially suspicious when the product or service being promoted is for (or being presented as) an investment opportunity, because the risks are so much higher. I think we can draw a distinction between the promotion of speculative investment opportunities, and the promotion of less risky products and services. If my favorite woodworker youtuber gets me to buy a fancy saw I wind up not liking, I can probably return it and even if I can't, I'm only out fifty bucks or something. That's jut not the same as if a youtuber promoting a game gets me to "invest" a thousand dollars in a speculative product, especially if he's also got a huge investment in that same product that directly benefits from me buying and holding it while he has the opportunity to divest at inflated prices.
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Oct 13, 2021 20:51
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Companies have made games for decades, in which demand determines their willingness to create more supply, and this is a functional model for making money. There's a neverending demand for Monopoly sets, and so monopoly money and boardwalk cards have never gone out of print. There's no long-term global shortage of printers capable of printing things on paper or whatever. What restricts supply of CCGs (and LCGs) is company decisions to restrict that supply. Those decisions may be made in response to falling demand; TSR's classic mistake wasn't printing lots of books, it was printing lots of books that nobody wanted, and refusing to bother to find out what people wanted before printing far too many books. And the non-collectible nature of most games is not itself a reason to let the game go out of print. Dominion has more or less been in continuous print, and new product continues to sell, because there are still customers who want it and Rio Grande has seen fit to meet that demand with ever more printings of the same cards. Releasing new expansions for Dominion actually helps to keep the older expansions in print too, because "this game is still supported with new product" is a selling point for the base game, and older expansions are still viable within the current game. I assume Rio Grande has not run into huge card-printing problems that forced them to abandon most of their expansions after a while. All expansions are still in print, either in their original form or as a 2nd edition reprint (the base game, and Intrigue, the first expansion set). There's plenty of other examples. Bicycle endlessly prints the same bridge deck, Uno is still in print, the world does not seem to have run out of people who still want to buy tarot cards, etc. CCG/LCG card obsolescence are all entirely created by either a falloff of demand, intentional strategies for creating scarcity/rarity, or business incompetence; not printing capacity, or some inherent restriction in the card-printing industry. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Dec 7, 2021 |
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Dec 7, 2021 00:17
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 02:36 |
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As Codeacious said, mods are fine with a threadsplit (and if you'd like this thread renamed, just let me know). It's also OK for a thread to be low-traffic. It does mean people may not see the thread on the first page of TG, which is a shame, but if people bookmark it, it can still live. I've got bookmarked threads in other subs that have lasted years, but also can go two or three months between posts.
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Dec 12, 2021 03:57
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