Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures launched last week and quickly accrued more than 400,000 subscribers, making Funcom's new fantasy MMORPG an early success. In fact, the demand for Age of Conan's prized Collector's Edition, which comes with two unique in-game items among other goodies, is so high that one online retailer, GoGamer.com, is taking advantage of the situation by selling the game at a high markup on Amazon.com.

While researching the difficulties of finding the Collector's Edition and observing a number of EBay and Amazon Marketplace listings for the game, Tom's Games discovered that GoGamer.com was scalping Age of Conan's Collector's Edition. We stumbled across a private listing on Amazon's Marketplace for the title that was being sold by a company named "GoGamer" at nearly twice as much as the game's MSRP of $89.99.

We figured this couldn't be the well-respected GoGamer.com, but a quick check on Amazon showed that the listing was legitimate and that the seller was indeed GoGamer.com, according to the seller's profile on Amazon. Unfortunately, it appears that GoGamer.com recognized the frenzy over the Collector's Edition of Age of Conan and decided to move at least some of its copies of the game off-site at a huge markup.

We contacted GoGamer about the listing and spoke with Jason Williams, director of marketing at GoGamer.com, and confirmed that the company was indeed selling some of its few remaining Collector's Edition copies at a nearly 2x markup on Amazon for $157.00 (though the price would later go up). Williams said it was not his decision and that the decision was made by the company's management. So why did GoGamer.com decide to sell some of its inventory at such a high price on an alternate channel instead of offering the Collector's Edition on its Web site for a fair price?

GoGamer.com's listing on Amazon.com.

Williams explained the situation and put some of the blame on the game's publisher, Eidos. According to Williams, Eidos failed to inform them of the correct MSRP of the product, which was $89.99, and as a result they mistakenly sold the Collector's Edition at a significant discount of $74.99 for about four to six weeks. "People really got a great deal, while we lost our shorts," Williams said. "Then Eidos corrected us." He also went on to explain that Eidos and Funcom did a poor job of communicating with GoGamer.com during the pre-launch period of Age of Conan and kept the retailer in the dark about pre-orders bonuses like early access codes, which the company was not allowed to advertise to consumers.

Williams also explained that GoGamer was forced to spend thousands of dollars extra on next-day shipping costs for Age of Conan so that they could remain competitive with the likes of Best Buy and GameStop. He explained that their overhead on the Collector's Edition was excessive, and that because of the skewed economics of the video game business, retailers like GoGamer.com made "only a couple bucks" off the game. "This is still a business," Williams told us, "and we still need to make money." As a result of losing money on the game, the decision was made to sell some of the remaining Collector's Edition copies at an extremely high markup through other channels like Amazon.

So how many copies did GoGamer.com sell? In terms of the actual stock that was moved off-site, we didn't get a specific number from GoGamer.com. Williams told us that the retailer only put cancelled and returned orders of the Collector's Editions on Amazon, although we have no way of verifying this. Williams admitted that moving the Collector's Editions through Amazon could be viewed as being against GoGamer.com's style. "I suppose if there was one instance of us dinging the market, I guess this is it," he said. "[But] if you see us marking up one game, I can show you a million others at below MSRP."

Williams also told Tom's Games several times that market conditions supported a higher price point for the Collector's Edition (which GoGamer.com had initially set at $157.00, plus shipping, on Amazon). He also argued that the Collector's Editions were probably going to increase in value over time, especially given their limited availability of around 110,000 copies, and pointed out the current value of World of WarCraft Collector's Editions. As of the posting of this article, the listing had gone up in price again, at a price point of $162.90, plus shipping.

GoGamer.com originally priced the Age of Conan Collector's Edition at $157.00 on Amazon, but the price would later go up.

Obviously GoGamer received its Age of Conan copies through Eidos at discounted prices, which were meant to be sold through official retail channels at an MSRP instead of a high markup. We also sought feedback from Age of Conan publisher Eidos on the situation. Upon notification, the Eidos representative that we spoke with seemed surprised that GoGamer.com was selling copies of the Collector's Edition at such a high markup through an alternative channel, and is now in the process of looking into it further.

A surprise to us as well as Eidos, the desire to capitalize off the low stock of the Collector's Editions obviously reaches and perhaps crosses the boundaries of legitimate companies like GoGamer.com, which is essentially acting like a ticket scalper charging outlandish prices for a popular ballgame or concert. We don't know what kind of profit margin GoGamer.com is making off of Age of Conan on either its own Web site or Amazon. But it's clear the company is going outside the lines of normal business practices and is sticking gamers with the bill. Whether or not GoGamer.com incurs any backlash from consumers or Eidos remains to be seen.

Join our discussion on this topic