https://x.com/valvesoftware/status/2051695149026353424
“Steam Controller ran out faster than we anticipated, and we hate that not everyone who wanted one was able to get it. We’re working on getting more in stock and will have an update on expected timeline soon.”
Honestly I don’t even blame them for underestimating demand. Based on comments here and my own personal intuition, I would’ve guessed that it would’ve sold great, to a very niche audience.
Maybe it has more widespread demand than expected, those track pads make it amazing for any couch PC usage, gaming or not, and many existing SteamDeck owners like myself are already aware of this.
To everyone complaining about scalpers: if you report them on ebay, they will get taken down. Go make their lives harder!
Any listing that went up before the official release date should automatically be flagged and removed
Agreed, but we do what we can.
Yeah, agreed. eBay is notorious for being brutal on sellers, taking them down rather easily.
Scam listings are still everywhere though.
An absolutely based strategy would be to launch a highly anticipated product with falsely constrained supply. Then right as the scalpers start posting their shit release the real supply with like a $10 price reduction and make a big announcement. Scalpers get rekt when everyone who wants one can get it for $10 less.
Why not just take all the orders now and increase the estimated shipping date? Cut scalpers off at the knees by eliminating FOMO.
I love my original steam controller. I want one of the new ones for when my original eventually breaks. I don’t need it now though. So I would be happy to wait, if I knew they weren’t going to abandon it like the old controller.
Please Valve, get the fuck off X.
And at the very least, they shouldn’t be paying the fascists running it $2,000 a year to be there.
There’s a decent chance an account as big as Valve gets the “premium business” bullshit for free. Not sure if there’s a way to tell but it’s definitely possible.
Only a rumor, but I’ve heard Gabe Newell is friendly and social with Elon Musk, as a fellow billionaire.
I think it was confirmed that they’re friends or at least used to be in like 2019. Not sure how it is now with how far off the deep end musk went.
Kinda reminds me of a poster I saw today advertising a communist group and an anti-billionaire rally. Had a QR code to follow them on Instagram and X. 🙄
Reminds me of a local pro-privacy group I came across a while back, whose only public online presence was a Facebook group.
Like I get it from a “reach” standpoint, and I think it’s fine if you’re following a POSSE system, but I feel a lot of people don’t do that.
Extinction Rebellion primarily used WhatsApp as their communication method. I always knew those guys were a bit of a joke but their opsec is utterly useless.
They’re a big enough name to make it work too.
Hell, Skip the baby step of Bluesky and get em a Mastodon account.
They should diversify where they post and help guide people to those other platforms, but just leaving X altogether wouldn’t accomplish anything. They need to talk to the people where they are
they are on bluesky fwiw
They need to be on Mastodon specifically.
Really any activitypub compatible service. Honestly for a big company like that I dislike mastodon, bluesky, anything twitter adjacent, because then responses become a linear “stream of consciousness”of people responding and it’s hard to filter the signal from the noise. Honestly I’d prefer a valve community on lemmy somewhere that they run
It’s unfortunate BlueSky is going the way it is the atproto seems pretty cool, and tangled appeals to me for the social appeal of code.
Valve dont need to be on X lol, anything they post in an official manner on any site, will be immediately shared by news outlets anyway.
Same goes for any large company.
That’s nonsense, if they post on their own website a thousand twitter accounts would screenshot and reshare.
Well said. Valve is a business, and X is where you post if you actually want a massive number of eyes on your content. The only real alternative is facebook and maybe tictok.
Convince the user base to switch platforms first, and the companies will follow.
Every time they make a news announcement on a different platform, just make a tweet that says “Hey, Valve news update here: <link>. BTW, fuck Elon”
Easier said than done but they’d hardly be the first.
PSA: don’t buy any from eBay. fuck scalpers.
if you don’t buy it they won’t sell it. if they don’t sell it, they won’t buy more.
Should report them on eBay too. Force eBay to stop allowing this behavior!
Technically, if they don’t list it as a “Pre-sale” or “Pre-order”, they can be reported. See here.
REPORT scalpers on ebay.
Scalping is legal in lots of countries.
Marrying children is legal in a lot of countries, doesn’t make pedophilia any less disgusting and immoral. Fuck scalpers.
People reselling stuff for profit is the cornerstone of capitalism.
They are wholly different situations, and it’s astonishing you went there for a rebuttal.
Fuck capitalism even harder. Scalpers can fuck off die alongside capitalism.
That doesn’t mean you go and abuse someone’s reporting system for something that’s not against their rules or their countries sellers rules.
You just seem to be very angry about this, chill out dude.
But it is against the rules you muppet and if not, it can become against the rules if people report enough.
Edit: Am I angry about some fuckers buying up all the stock in minutes and then reselling for x3 the price? FUCK YES, I AM SEETHING ANGRY 😡.
And I guess you are one of these fuckers scalping shit, by the way you defend them. FUCK YOU CUNT!
Steam hardware selling faster than Nintendo hardware.
They could just open up a permanent preorder system for all of their hardware and avoid the bullshit to begin with.
Yeah, I mean, at this point valve has proved to be trustworthy. I wouldn’t mind placing a pre-order or backorder with them.
Plus hardware preorders actually still make sense because it can’t just be digitally copied and a key generated without anyone even needing to press a button. Which was also the case for games at one point.
How the did it with the steam deck was nice. It wasn’t a pre-order in the usual sense, since you didn’t pay anywhere close to full price. Just a refundable $5 that would go towards the cost of purchase when you bought it.
I don’t mind that for hardware, since it cuts out scalpers and doesn’t obligate you to purchase something before you know the quality.
That’s 100% the way to do it. Wonder why they aren’t doing that again. Maybe they’ll open it up.
As someone who waited 6 months for their Framework 13 pre-order batch to ship, let me tell you, there are drawbacks to that system as well!
I already waited a few years for a new Steam Controller, so what’s another half a year?
Looks to me more an endorsement of preordering when stock is limited. If delivering laptops in the order it received took 6 months then a first come first serve would have meant no laptop at all within 6 months for many people who wanted one.
It’d come down more to who is the luckiest and has the best bots.
Fucking consumerism. Everyone really NEEDS brand new controller now. Because valve…
It is a quite unique controller for PC with those trackpads and highly customizable functions, and most people with similar first gen Steam Controller are on the point of breaking it or wanting a little bit extra of those same functions they’re used to. It’s normal to have high demand, and if many of those are scalpers they’ll get fucked by that problem.
You are 100% right despite the downvotes.
Consumerism will be the end of humanity.
That or communism
Nobody needs it, but people want it because it’s an interesting product by a renowned company
I don’t. I already have an 8bitdo controller and not looking for one.
However, there are others that do, perhaps some that haven’t even considered using a controller on PC.
Did they not limit pre-orders to people with existing steam accounts and one controller per account because that would have been an excellent idea and I assumed that they would have thought of that.
Anyway I have zero interest in the controller until the VR headset comes out.
They did it with the Deck, but apparently didn’t think the controller would garner the same reaction, somehow.
They did do it with the controller though
Yeah I think the limit was two per account. I don’t think scalpers are really to blame here they just really didn’t account for how much people wanted this thing.
Don’t feed the scalpers people
It wouldn’t have cost them anything to say “we’re opening up orders to users who have had a Steam account for at least 2 years, limit 2 per account. After 30 days we’ll open it up to everyone. “
That alone would have stopped so much scalping, and garnered goodwill with the players.
That’s a really good idea
You can report scalpers and get their listings taken down on ebay.
But do offer them a carrot they can never quite reach but seems worth going out of their way for.
What I don’t understand is why they don’t just let everyone place orders regardless of current stock over a certain time window, then once the ordering window is closed, arrange for production to meet demand? Or at least do something like a first-come, first-serve waitlist after the initial stock sells out.
Sure, it would take significantly longer to go from order to delivery, but the customer experience would be so much better without having to deal with the mad scramble to try and get an order in the minute they open up. Letting people stake their claim even if stock hasn’t caught up yet would also deter scalpers.
Maybe there’s a good reason for this, but I don’t know what that could possibly be.
A) You’ll have people selling their place in line, which means that those who can afford to take a large quantity of orders in advance can profit from the difference
B) It’s not exactly good PR to order something and having to wait a variable window of time for it to finally arive at your door (see almost all Bethesda merch incidents post Fallout NV)
C) Valve doesn’t operate like a dropshipper. There is no “white label” steam controller being made in china that they can slap their logo on and sell as soon as people order for it. They have to contract volume in advance, since it’s a bespoke product.
If only they limited it to 1 per steam account and made it only available to accounts that are sufficiently old.
You can buy counter strike and tf2 defunct trading platform accounts that are decades old for pennies on the dollar.
Dang, I didn’t know that. Just gets more complicated!
Maybe active accounts that are old lol
Look at this comment chain is ideas that are good in theory
I’ve had friends who haven’t bought a game in a very long time and still plays games like it’s 2013 (wish I could do that). On the other hand I have a cousin who me and another cousin are tying to get into pc gaming, and thus has a very new account with practically no games, and might continue playing on his Xbox till he can a steam machine or decent pc
I for one would also love to stop scalpers and make a flag of their skin but that’s really hard when protections have to also not alienate any actual customers
Because market conditions are fucking insane right now. If they allow backorder and their production price doubles they would have to either honor the orders and take a huge loss, or refuse to honor the price and take a reputational hit.
$5 to get in queue. Price adjusted as needed when order is available. Done.
This free-for-all system is bullshit and has been extra shitty for everything since 2020.
They don’t even know how to price it they have to reorder everything and cost it out, prices are fluctuating a lot right now throughout the supply chain.
Why wouldn’t the scalpers just fill up the queue?
What’s the point of scalping if the supply is unlimited?
Supply is exactly as limited, in this scenario, as it is now. A queue does not cause valve to manufacture more.
One thing that comes to mind is that even if they get hit by a space rock tomorrow, your order is on it’s way. There’s guarantee it exists and is already destined for you. Seems fair and safe.
Seems like they are sacrificing revenue to guarantee they’ll be able to execute in the delivery. It’s not the highest bar, but it is a bar.
At this point, I’m not really even going to bother. I’ll just wait another year or so until people get enough then snag one.
I still haven’t bought a PS5 because of this lol. At first it was too expensive and scalpers bought them all, so I thought “no worries, I’ll wait a year or two and get one on the cheap when it’s older.” And then the price kept going up over time so I just never bothered.
My son has bugged me for a PS5 and I almost got one, but then convinced him that steam is more than enough for us. A friend of mine has over 2000 games and he shared it with me. Thankfully, my son was convinced 😂
I’m a bit miffed they didn’t handle the release better. Not sure what restrictions were in place but judging from eBay scalper screenshots it wasn’t much.
It was limited to two per purchase, but I could still add (and maybe buy) more after I bought my 2
If only there were two other console SKUs they sold in the past that would’ve better prepared them for this.
Scalpers are already selling it like double the MSRP.
There’s one listed for $500 on Ebay
Are they offering or selling at that price? I mean sure, I really want to play with that controller, that’s why I ordered it. But I also kinda offer it here, in this community exclusively, for like, idk, a million dollars? Offer negotianable 😅
I saw one that sold for $300 on eBay.
