Valve did a switcharoo on scalpers
(store.steampowered.com)
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Scalpers are in fact adding a service. They're allowing people with more resources to access the product/service more readily than people with less resources instead of simply allowing the people who showed up first to acquire the limited product/service. Nothing about a person showing up first suggests they necessarily deserve the product/service more than another person.
Think of a product/service before scalpers as public healthcare and the same product/service after scalpers as private healthcare. The product/service is matched more equitably to the people who end up with the product/service when scalpers set the price at the market equilibrium price based on supply/demand.
If businesses have a specific type of person they want to sell the product/service to then they should set restrictions on who they sell to based on these sets of consumers they wish to target. Prove your income is less than X a year by showing your previous year tax return and buy the product for Y amount. Simple stuff that can be automated nowadays. If they only want to target whoever buys it first then they're targeting scalpers who buy it first. If they can't sell to the specific customers they want to because of laws preventing it then the problem is government not scalpers.
To someone perhaps, but not to Valve. They set their prices where they set them for a reason, and easily could have set them higher if they wanted to provide the same 'service', I doubt the cost of an extra byte of bandwidth for the http responses for an extra digit in the price was the reason for making the price lower.
So Valve has no incentive not to fuck them over by misleading them about supply, and apparently at least some incentive to do so.