Holy fuck, not everything in this life needs to be profit maximized.

Ticketmaster does something very similar to this with their "demand weighted pricing" and it is just so sad that their solution to "scalping" is "let's bring that profit into our platform."

market doing what the market does.

The Dutch auction vs lottery are two ways to solve scalping. They differ in what one considers fair.

Profit and premium models can be great if it's allocated to useful things. For example if it went as bonuses to the rank and file employees, or was as steam store credit, or went to a charity.

I get your cynicism it would just go to billionaire shareholders, but profit itself isnt the enemy, greed is.

greed isn't even the worst. greed is a necessity if you have any competition. sometimes it's hard to tell greed from operational efficicency.

rent seeking however... rent seeking should be taxed to hell and back.

I think we define greed in a different manner, I presume what you call greed, I'd call self interest.

To me greed is being willing to take to the detriment of others.

> profit itself isnt the enemy, greed is

That's an interesting distinction in and of itself.

Why increase profit beyond need? How do you achieve that without becoming greedy? How do you ensure you respect the distinction you just made? How do you make it objective and avoid subjective, discretionary measures to push for higher profit?

It's not really about money or profit.

Society has found out money is a good way to encourage/discourage certain behavior in a predictable, deterministic, and quantifiable way. It really sucks that it has to be money, and maybe this can be solved with some other universal token that cannot be bought with wealth but equitably distributed some other way.

For example the dynamic fees in express lanes in California aren't really for the purposes of paying for the roads. They dynamically adjust it such that the traffic in the lane is operating at peak efficiency. Too few people using it obviously reduces throughput, so the price cheapens to have people using it, and too many people using it causes a collapse in efficiency so the price increases. Having some kind of adjustable cost on it lets the control system appropriately change the demand to keep it efficient.

It seems to me like a social score system is a direct upgrade to this in certain ways: participating in undesired behaviour will cause you headaches you cannot really solve with money. Too bad it "naturally" slips into mass surveillance, but restricting privileges would be a great alternative to reducing the ability to take care of necessities for you and yours.

It doesn't have to only be money. In person waiting time is another mechanism to allocate a scarce resource. Back in the day when # of tickets exceeded demand at a fixed price, the tickets went to he/she who was willing to arrive early and wait in line longer (ie, die hard fans). Camping out for tickets was a thing and I somewhat miss it relative to scalpers and price being the only mechanism to drive demand/supply to equilibrium.

You can get away from supply/demand laws. By pretending that something is not giverned by them and putting fixed price lower than real price (i.e. that price at which suppl equals demand) one leaves space for scalpers to exist and collect money that people are willing to spend over set price.

Given that people are going to spend money anyway it seems more honest and reasonable to direct this money to the party that makes the thing by letting it to run auction.

I don't see it really as profit maximising, just allocating it first to the people who want it the most. Like they are willing to pay scalpers.

You can get it at the lower price, you just have to wait. The same happens with loads of digital devices. On release day the price is higher.

If it helps you can separate it and have the first a 'ticket' in line to buy the product for the regular price. You just reserve your spot with the auction. The queue price just drops over time.

Because it damages the brand and many people will remember the product as being heavily overpriced and never come back.

It works only once per civilization, but Steam could run a dutch auction, then surprise! sell to the winners at list price.

because the less wealthy get mad about it

Most companies need customers that don't hate their guts, that's why they don't do this

Because they want to maximize longterm profitability and believe (which makes sense to me) this approach would harm that

Because public image matters. Steam has built a reputation for being customer friendly. Coming up with a Byzantine pricing system for your highly anticipated new hardware will not be well received by the steam users. The extra short term earning will be a drop in the bucket compared to what steam is already making from taking 30% off most game sells, but the reputation damage will linger forever.

The funny thing is, someone paying $3,400 for a Steam Machine would be an idiot.

Internally, it's equivalent to a mid-grade PC from 2018. You're not playing AAA games in 4K on this thing.

Because long-term this destroys goodwill.