Scalpers Asking Median Price Of $220 To See Game Of Thrones A Couple Weeks Early

See that face? That’s the same one I made when I heard these tickets sold out in 15 minutes.

Yesterday morning, thousands of Game of Thrones fans hopped onto the Ticketmaster website promptly at 10 a.m. ET in the hopes of getting some of the 7,000 fifteen dollar tickets to see the season premiere of the HBO show on March 20 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Within minutes, they were sold out and hundreds of them quickly went on sale via Stubhub and elsewhere.

As of right now, there are 460 tickets available via Stubhub, with the cheapest being $70 — nearly five times the face value — and one pair in the fourth row going for $5,505.30 per ticket. That’s 367 times the $15 cost of the ticket. The current median value of passes is around $220.

Numerous GoT fans have expressed their anger at Ticketmaster over what they see as a flubbed sale. Many people claim that they were unable to buy tickets at the 10 a.m. start time because the only option available for purchase at the time was a block of tickets reserved for New York University students. Purchasing those tickets required a special code. Some angered fans say that the regular price tickets didn’t go on sale for them until around 10:10 a.m.

Additionally, people took issue with Ticketmaster’s bizarre and capricious customer queue. Rather than simply telling you which tickets are available right then and there, you are given a spinning wheel with a countdown clock telling you an approximate wait time before the site will even consider your request.

“When I went online at 10:06, it first told me the wait time was ‘less than 9 minutes,’ but then it ballooned to ‘more than 13 minutes’ and up and down, all the way from 3 minutes back up to 9 again,” one reader tells Consumerist. “While I’m waiting, a friend who started waiting AFTER I did texts me to say she got tickets… just as I finally get told that there are no tickets available now but I should try again because who knows, maybe they’ll magically reappear?”

We asked this disappointed fan if she’d be willing to pay StubHub prices to see the season premiere early.

“Maybe at $20 or $30, but not a chance am I paying $70 to sit on the second level of a basketball arena,” says the fan, “especially not since the event was touted as a fundraiser with all the ticket money going to a good cause.”

by Chris Morran via Consumerist