The Pokemon Company will begin using facial recognition at official Pokemon Card Stores in Japan in an effort to discourage scalpers.
The publisher already announced this summer that it would use standardized, but not mandatory, Japanese ID called My Number Cards to verify some transactions made through the official Japanese Pokemon TCG website. Soon, it'll be harder to buy a TCG pack than board an international flight.
The company explains its intentions to use facial recognition in a post on its Japanese website (h/t IGN) revealing the start of Pokemon Card Stores, which will be dedicated to selling Pokemon Trading Card Game packs and related merch, as well as hosting free classes to learn the ways of Pokemon TCG. All five initial stores located across Japan will, according to machine translation, be outfitted with facial recognition "to prevent crime."
The Pokemon Company says anyone elementary school age and older will have their facial data slurped up by their recognition system, but preschoolers will not, as 3-year-olds are presumably deemed low-risk. After all, everyone knows you never start cranking up the price on resold TCG packs until the ketchup-and-mayo grime of second grade starts gettng to you.
In Japan, certain new products launch under a lottery system, and store workers give everyone who lines up outside a number that lets them buy the product when it's called. So, with its new facial recognition system, The Pokemon Company is hoping it can prevent nefarious resellers by correctly allocating one number per buyer, preventing people from showing up on line multiple times, or padding the line with multiple buyers.
The company also instructs potential buyers to alert staff if they have to leave to use the bathroom. Who knows, they could be planning to stick on a fake mustache and googly-eye glasses while they're in there.
Clearly, based on the intense defenses The Pokemon Company is raising, scalping and stealing is a serious international problem in the Pokemon TCG community. Earlier this year, an unofficial store in New York was even robbed at gunpoint of $100,000 worth of merchandise.
Though, I don't know if The Pokemon Company turning its stores into a surveillance state makes me feel especially safe, either.
