So you make a print so small that charging $90 for it is viable? What's the point in making a print so limited unless you're trying to get nearly triple the original asking price oh wait, they're evil.

Totally side-stepped my point: FF7 was going for just as much as Xenoblades, and it got reprinted and shipped to many many stores and it was sold, new, for $20. All the games I listed were.

If they got reprints, why did they crack open all the games? Nobody's explaining this. Why do that?

There's no proof of this. More likely they procured additional stock from a third-party vendor

Then why are they selling them used?

They had thousands and thousands of unopened copies they could have sold for what, it was $40 at launch, wasn't it? But they didn't. They saw a trend, held back their stock and unloaded it for much more than it should have been sold at.

Well, as far as I know, all those copies were already paid for. What they COULDN'T do is just throw up new copies at $90 because if they did that, everyone would be calling them assholes, instead of just smart people.

You realize them holding back all the stock is the only reason the game's price went up.

The only reason they went for $90 on Ebay is because Gamestop withheld their stock (which, by the way, was not moving fast at all, as they were the ONLY retail outlet selling the game, if I recall correctly), created a false scarcity, and monopolized on their monopoly. They couldn't sell them new for $90 because it…

This is one of those times... JUST ONE of those times...

It means the game did NOT sell out; they simply took what was left of the unsold new stock, housed it, waited for prices on eBay to rise and cracked open all the cases and made twice as much as they would have if they had just sold their copies.

I didn't make that face until I saw that female models were being held for ransom at the $135K mark.

I fired it up once. I wasn't very thrilled.

Ah, I forgot. When I left, they were premaking folded eggs instead of cooking them. Probably because scrambled eggs take like, thirty seconds and folded took a few more. High-volume stores during Breakfast got murdered for a very long time before they changed that...

See? That's all you have to do. Stop making excuses for stealing and just cop up. "I am a pirate". There's no justification, so you could have saved yourself a bunch of keystrokes by just saying "You know, I don't pay for this stuff" instead of trying to justify being a thief.

...

No, the carton eggs I'm talking about definitely still have yolk in them... Sorry, "yolk".

Apparently it was just a rumor, hence the edit, but I read it on Kotaku. It was one of their week in review news blips.

You're talking about the shareware episodes. At no point in the history of ever did id give out full copies of Doom or Commander Keen 5.

Well, there is that.

Amen