The term scalping comes from a historic practice of removing a human scalp. In the US, ticket scalping means a third party in a trade “cutting off the top” of prices for tickets. There are similar practices by sleazy companies for other types of sales.
In that tradition, I guess game scalping means either picking up a copy of a game for cheap or for free, possibly stolen, then offering the game at a lower price than its legitimate selling price.
That would typically be bad in the way book pirating is. The original seller or creator might lose out on sales, the copies can be missing parts or deliberately contain malware, and the audience will likely suffer from a lose in trust, affecting the social dynamic. (Ethical exceptions exist.)
Scraping is similar, but that implies automation. It’s data collection. An alogorithm is set to copy games, with or without permission from the game creators, publishers, or distributors. Scraping can be for archiving, analysis, or illegal trading.
When it’s not with the knowledge and consent of the game creators or publishers, scraping is bad. It’s essentially something between spying and stealing, taking away options from the people who put their own labor and funding into the game creation.
When scrapers act on their own, game buyers and players have trouble finding accurate info about games and where they came from, game developers lose out in a bunch of ways, and there’s a higher risk of money going to unexpected places, to the people and processes that increasingly harm everyone in gaming.
Scraping and scalping are both used by scammers.
