Star Wars Card Trader: The Definition of Insanity

[Mzo]

Star Wars Card Trader Site

I'm not sure when they started doing this, but Topps is actually selling digital cards to people for real money. I guess this is similar to the Magic:The Gathering digital game only much, much worse.

I recognize the genius in convincing collectards that digital .jpgs are real things. That's a fantastic step for Topps, saving them a fortune by axing anything past the design stage. Who needs manufacturing or shipping costs when you can just save the file and ctrl-c? That much I get. But actually convincing these people that they're not just worth money, but that there can actually be a scarcity to digital goods? Mwah. Amazing. That requires a special kind of stupidity from the consumer that is just astounding.

The rarest jpg seems to be this Han Solo image which I now own exactly as much as any person who has paid money to have it in an app/program that will one day disappear, and I am a thousand percent sure this is all handled server-side.

This doesn't just make me roll my eyes. This bothers me. This makes my life worse by existing.

[YellerDog]

In a real sense that's all they've ever done.

[Yoshi]

How is that different than the loot drops in WoW or Borderlands? Digital scarcity isn't new or exclusive to this.

[Mzo]

How is that different than the loot drops in WoW or Borderlands? Digital scarcity isn't new or exclusive to this.

The difference for me is that those are actual games, the drops have a use that will improve my experience of the game, and, unless you take the cost of the game/subscription fee and divide it among every item I've ever collected in those games, I never paid a single penny to acquire any of them.

This is like paying for cosmetic DLC except the game is missing.

I think people are crazy to pay a fortune for an old comic, an old trading card or an old video game, but those are real things that exist. I just say they're crazy to exaggerate.

This is a server-side jpg that will disappear when the servers get pulled. Paying for this is real crazy.

[Yoshi]

Did you ever collect physical cards or comics? I don't mean buying old ones but rather when they are readily available.

edit: I'm not interested in this "game" in the least, but I'm also not offended by its existence. Lots of people buy digital comics these days that could also vanish if they're no longer available to download. I don't see the difference. It all comes down to why someone collects. If it's for potential profiteering, then digital won't work (I hope). However, if it's just to admire a collection or stare at individual items, it isn't any different than the physical equivalents.

[Mzo]

Yeah, cards and stickers, but never more than casually.

Actual, physical objects that exist in the real world. And even then they were pretty cheap and disposable things.

[Yoshi]

And even then they were pretty cheap and disposable things.

Surely these digital card packs are relatively cheap, so how is it different? If it's disposable anyway, then what is the risk of the back end support going away?

edit: Hell, you could argue for lots of environmental reasons that anything that is disposable that moves to digital is a good thing. Trucks aren't delivering them, they aren't printed on downed trees, they don't wind up in land fills, etc.

[Mzo]

I don't see digital files as equals to their real-world counterparts.

[Yoshi]

That's why you have a bunch of extraneous discs and shit laying around. Thanks again for helping me reduce my pile.

[kingoffighters]

It should be easy for us Jedi masters to ignore obvious cash grab like this.