Disclaimer: This was mostly for my own curiosity, and the estimates are probably flawed in one way or another.
I was wondering how much of the Steam Controller sales went to scalpers. Lots of websites have reported on scalpers reselling the controller, but most of those articles just focus on how much is being asked for the controller, not how many are actually available/being sold. That doesn’t really tell us much by itself.
Looking at ebay’s sold items, there’s about ~240* listed Steam Controllers that have been sold since the announcement.
There’s an additional 20 current listing I see for the new Steam controller, that haven’t sold yet (weirdly, almost all the unsold listing are located in Australia, with only a single remaining listing for a US seller).
Next question is how many Steam Controllers were available to buy. Approximate estimate for the US was around 35,000-40,000 controllers*. Europe would have it’s own supply.
So while there were scalpers, it doesn’t seem like they were responsible for a meaningful percentage of the sales.
Additional notes: Valve limited controller sales to 2 per transaction, but didn’t limit it to 2 per account. This is speculated to have been a mistake, but still would have limited how many scalpers could have gotten with how hard it was to complete a transaction.
*Math section:
5 pages of results for steam controllers in the ebay sold section, at 60 items per page, so a max of 300 sold. However, none of those pages are just the 2026 Steam Controller, a lot are actually the classic steam controller, hori steam controller, steam link, or other controllers that advertise that they’re for steam. I didn’t do an exact count for all 5 pages, but only 48 out of 60 results on page 4 were the steam controller 2026, so around ~240 units.
The number of controllers sold in the US is based on the shipment of controllers Valve received. It was 28,500 lbs/12,970 kg. The controller and puck weigh 308g, which would divide out to something like 42,000 controllers in the shipment. After adding in additional packaging, 35,000-40,000 is a more likely estimate. The shipment officially contained 40 packages, so possibly 1000 controllers per package.
Unlike some comments here, I don’t think this is a “test run.” Valve just doesn’t like to sit on inventory. Where most companies let some stock build up before opening the flood gates, Valve just puts a product up for sale when the first shipping container comes out of the factory. Many customers end up feeling left out if they can’t make the first wave, but technically the majority of customers get the product earlier than they otherwise would have, so I’m sure Valve sees it as a win-win.
We’ll probably see a steady supply of similar batches for a while. The Deck preorders shipped much the same way.
Yeah, people in general seem to not understand that stock sitting in a warehouse = you burning money to pay for renting that warehouse, or space in that warehouse.
You have to be… mega-giant huge, your own logistiscs system, for that to basically not be the case, you have to be Amazon, Walmart, something like that.
Even then, that factor still exists, its just mitigated by the overwhelming scale.
And actually, with… oil/gas basically now permanently notched up to another tier, even in the best case scenario… this pressure just gets worse.
Also, even before the Deck, the Index was basically the same way.
Yeah, I work at a plant where this is an ongoing concern. If we overstock product, we have to rent trailers to store the excess. The price works out to about $12 per pallet per month. It’s not much, but it’s also not nothing, and if we were in a more urban area, I could see that price quickly getting higher.
Yep, you got it.
And yep, high property value areas?
Yep, gets worse fast.
You end using something along the lines of an overflow lot, halfway across the city, and that overflow lot probably doesn’t have the same level of access, security, reliable climate control, etc, as your main warhouse / storage site.