Gamestop has been marking up their Pokémon card decks by multiples of three and even four over their retail pricing from the Pokémon Center, the official primary retailer for Pokémon merchandise, according to reporting by Engadget.
Engadget reporter Sam Rutherford noticed that the price of an Ascended Heroes Booster Bundle at Gamestop was a whopping $90, more than three times the $27 charged for the same item by the Pokémon Center, while more rare or collectible items, such as the 30th Anniversary Ultra-Premium Collection, were marked up by as much as 400%, retailing for $600 at Gamestop compared to its usual $120 MSRP.
This phenomenon is a small part of a larger trend driven by a mismatch between an item’s original cost and its value on the second-hand market. Other obvious examples include coveted sneakers, concert tickets, and high-end luxury items like Swiss-made watches and luxury handbags by Chanel or Hermès.
Everyone is fighting for a share of the aftermarket value of these high-demand luxury items. So, any time this mismatch exceeds 200 percent of the item’s original cost, there’s a strong financial incentive for third-party retailers to step in. Which is why fights keep breaking out at Costco stores when new Pokémon cards are released.
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Gamestop can plausibly argue that it’s just engaging in what economists call pricing equilibrium, raising the cost of the cards to better reflect their true market value, but as Rutherford points out, this also puts the cards financially out of reach for a huge chunk of the intended Pokémon card consumer market, who aren’t in fact collectors flush with cash but children and teenagers eager to play a card game.
For its part, Nintendo is aware of these problems. At its most recent annual shareholders meeting, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa spoke of a commitment to allowing fans to purchase Pokémon cards with “peace of mind,” and vowed to “take measures to respond to this [price gouging] issue,” though he was notably reticent to list specific steps.
Take a step back from Pokémon cards and Gamestop’s actions start to look like part of a much broader trend. Earlier this year, Rockstar Games made the controversial decision not to sell physical copies of its upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 game, instead offering in-store fans a box with a digital code inside it, effectively killing the resale market for what will surely be the best-selling game of the year and probably the decade, while Sony announced it will no longer support disc drives after January 2028.
From this wide-angle perspective, these attempts to eat into the aftermarket seem distinctly anti-consumer and likely to provoke a significant backlash.
