This guy will have to wait for his younger brother.
It was available to buy starting noon local time. I refreshed the page until the buy option became available, but kept getting an error when submitting payment. Waited about half an hour and now it’s sold out. Ni modo I guess.
I barely managed to get one, had to spend well over 20 minutes spamming the continue button, because the first couple of times I passed that screen something else failed (they even charged me one of those times but the purchase didn’t finish, so I imagine it will get reverted in a while).
I liked my old steam controller more in theory than in practice, I still have it and use it occasionally but it’s more of a rarity when I think the features make up for the lack of d-pad and right stick. But the Steam Deck is just ideal for me, from the moment I grabbed it I have been wanting a standalone controller with that same format and inputs.
In any case, sorry you didn’t get one now, I’m sure they’ll be back in stock very quickly, it’s likely they did a small batch first to test the waters on how much people wanted this. But production is probably ramping up just like what happened with the Steam Deck.