Super Mario 3D All-Stars, which was announced earlier this week, is already being scalped for stupidly high prices on the internet. The collection includes Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy and was announced in celebration of Mario's 35th anniversary, alongside Tetris 99-like Super Mario Bros. 35, a remastered Switch port of Super Mario 3D World, and a series of Mario-themed events, items, and more in first-party, such as Mario power-ups in Splatoon 2.
Physical copies of Super Mario 3D All-Stars also come with over 170 music tracks from across the three games. Each 3D Mario game included is considered a classic in their own right, and they all have Metacritic scores over 90 percent. There's been some controversy with this collection's announcement, as many fans are wondering why Super Mario Galaxy 2 was not included; however, some speculate that Super Mario Galaxy 2 will make it to the Switch next year as part of something else, or simply ported on its own like Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury.
True to the thriving scalper community that Nintendo's economy of artificial scarcity that it openly courts, NintendoLife reports that there are already over four hundred listings for Super Mario 3D All-Stars on eBay alone. The prices range in USD from the mid-seventies to ten thousand dollars (although that extreme end is hopefully more of a joke). To buy the collection outright from Nintendo will only cost the usual sixty dollars and can be bought digitally, so these price gougers are directly targeting those who want a physical copy.
The reason that scalpers are going to work on this collection so early and for such huge price mockups is that for some reason Nintendo has set it for a limited release. Mario fans will only be able to buy Super Mario 3D All-Stars until next March, meaning it will only be for sale physically and digitally for around six months. Scalpers know that Nintendo is only manufacturing and selling a limited run of Super Mario 3D All-Stars and that players won't be able to buy it at all soon, and they're going to squeeze every last penny they can out of desperate players.
There is something to physical media. Beyond the nice look of a collection on a shelf or that new video game box smell, there is a guarantee of ownership that digital copies can't provide. Online accounts get hacked, passwords can be lost, and all servers eventually shut down - at any point, a digital product can suddenly become tied up behind layers of invisible tape. That being said, physical discs aren't invincible and cartridges can be misplaced or easily stolen, but that doesn't mean that physical media fans deserve to be punished by scalpers or (inherently) Nintendo in this instance. There's no surefire way to prevent price gouging, but the particularly poor situation surrounding Nintendo products is only going to burn consumers worse and worse until it drops its anti-consumer artificial scarcity tactics.
Source: Nintendo Life
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