New and sealed on eBay is pretty verifiable. Their return policy is very buyer-friendly, so not much of a risk there. And physical retail is still not in the mix here.
The real question is this: what do you believe would have made more money? For them to do as they have done, with a release price of $30 and then hike up to $60, or a release price of $20 or $25 and a price hike to $30? If the answer is the latter, they made the wrong call. It’s a hypothetical, so of course we will never have a real answer (which is half the fun of online debating, of course), but I fervently believe the latter option, or something similar in that vein, would have had at least a chance to penetrate beyond the diehards and get them some actual market share. But once that price goes up to $60, this game is going to effectively disappear from the scopes in weeks or even days, which has a very real chance of delaying DLC releases and screwing things even further when it starts to look less worthwhile to spend time and effort renovating a building without a lot in the way of paying tenants.