Consoles, TCGs, and game pop-up stores. Do you notice a recurring theme lately? They are plagued by 'flies'. I am referring, of course, to the scalpers—those parasitic opportunists who swarm these venues not to enjoy the product, but to flip it for a quick profit. The moment there is a whiff of easy money, the flies swarm in. This is causing no end of grief for genuine consumers and store staff alike. The most prominent recent headache in the domestic gaming scene has been the 'Nintendo Switch 2'. With scalpers banking on a price hike in September, the scene was thrown into complete, unmitigated chaos.

It gets worse. We have seen people buying out entire stocks of photo cards, pulling the rare ones, and dumping the rest on the street. We have seen the audacity of those who throw tantrums because they were denied a purchase they felt entitled to, and even those who boast about their 'success' in ripping others off. Store owners have been forced to pick up the 'fly swatter'. Take the recent 'Dreamy Patissiere' pop-up store, which gained notoriety for its 'answer a quiz to enter' policy, or retailers requiring phone-number identity verification for pick-ups. This is not just a local issue; even the Pokemon Card stores in Japan have resorted to installing facial recognition systems to keep the situation under control. It is a bitter reality when retailers must treat every customer with suspicion just to keep the shelves stocked.

While they erode social trust, scalpers stubbornly maintain that 'this is just a skill and an opportunity to make money.' They even spout the sophistry that their presence is a sign of an IP's popularity. Because they dance along the thin, grey line of the law, they exploit the lack of regulatory teeth, and the situation continues to spiral.

Perhaps it is time we considered institutional countermeasures, much like the recent revisions to the Public Performance Act meant to curb ticket scalping. The practice of scalping games and merchandise has been left in a legal blind spot, often hidden behind the laughable term 'resell-tech'. We need effective measures so that consumers who pay a fair price and the developers and retailers who put in the hard work are not left out in the cold.