It didn’t take long for Pokemon Go Fest tickets to sell out within a couple of minutes of being released, but a lot of that likely has to do with ticket scalpers who grabbed tickets and are now reselling them at some pretty insane prices.
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While you’d have to first factor in getting to Chicago’s Grant Park to be present for Pokemon Go Fest, the tickets for Pokemon Go’s first live events originally went on sale for just $20, not a bad price at all. If you missed out on the tickets during the brief window that they were available and are now looking to pick them up on a third-party site like eBay, you’ll be hard-pressed to find them for such a price since they’re now bidding in the hundreds, sometimes even crossing the $1,000 mark.
A quick look through eBay’s listings for the Pokemon Go Fest tickets will confirm that they are indeed going for a lot more than what was intended when they first went on sale. Some of the more affordable options — if any of them could be considered affordable when you look at the original price — are going for around $200, depending on how many bids they have. And people aren’t ignoring the listings either, there’s definitely bids that are being placed on them, all the way up until the item listing closes ends. At the time of this writing, one such listing was priced at $228 with just 5 hours left on the sale, and the item has already amassed 38 bids.
Bundles also aren’t out of the question here as many of the listings are offering to sell multiple wristbands at a combined price. Groupings of three or five event passes will run you anywhere from $600 to $1,000, but it doesn’t look like too many buyers are desperate enough to go for the very expensive ones just yet.
If you weren’t able to get your ticket in time and you definitely don’t plan on buying one now that the price has gone up, you won’t miss out on the event entirely. A tweet from the game came after the tickets disappeared to confirm that players who weren’t able to get a ticket will still be able to earn rewards and participate in worldwide events.
