Valve did a switcharoo on scalpers
(store.steampowered.com)
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Either on purpose or accident, Valve fucked scalpers.
Quick version: Valve released a new controller May 4th but it was gobbled up by scalpers in 30 minutes. Many were put in e-Bay for 300+.
Today, Valve released more and put down better restrictions to get it to actual players. Player have to had bought a game on Steam before April 2026, you can only purchase 1, and you can’t purchase another one if you bought one before.
There's nothing to dislike about this outcome. Scalpers are subhumans.
why?
Because scalping is pure parasitic rent-seeking. If you're buying something for resale, it should be because you are making a useful contribution - like consolidating multiple products into a single convenient store close to customers. If you see a business that's already being consumer-friendly and you only see an opportunity to be exploited by stripping all the consumer-friendliness out of it, you are the reason we can't have nice things.
fair
Scalpers are in fact adding a service. They're allowing people with more resources to access the product/service more readily than people with less resources instead of simply allowing the people who showed up first to acquire the limited product/service. Nothing about a person showing up first suggests they necessarily deserve the product/service more than another person.
Think of a product/service before scalpers as public healthcare and the same product/service after scalpers as private healthcare. The product/service is matched more equitably to the people who end up with the product/service when scalpers set the price at the market equilibrium price based on supply/demand.
If businesses have a specific type of person they want to sell the product/service to then they should set restrictions on who they sell to based on these sets of consumers they wish to target. Prove your income is less than X a year by showing your previous year tax return and buy the product for Y amount. Simple stuff that can be automated nowadays. If they only want to target whoever buys it first then they're targeting scalpers who buy it first. If they can't sell to the specific customers they want to because of laws preventing it then the problem is government not scalpers.
To someone perhaps, but not to Valve. They set their prices where they set them for a reason, and easily could have set them higher if they wanted to provide the same 'service', I doubt the cost of an extra byte of bandwidth for the http responses for an extra digit in the price was the reason for making the price lower.
So Valve has no incentive not to fuck them over by misleading them about supply, and apparently at least some incentive to do so.
Why does a purely parasitical, purely disruptive existence that exists to enrich itself on the suffering of others constitute being subhuman?
You can't guess?
Scalping is most often associated with tickets to events. I say who cares because if you don't buy the tickets than the scalpers get royally fucked.
I mean, yeah. Why the fuck would i want to waste monitor space with someone else? Get your own rig, peasant.
Player two gets the cheap off-brand controller, as is tradition.
And the uncomfortable small chair!
FUCKING MADCATZ
How do you know it was scalpers? Yes there are some on ebay, but only valve knows how many tens of thousands were purchased by genuine customers. I suspect it was simply far more popular than anticipated
I suspect Valve looked at their orders, saw that many were from new accounts with sophisticated forms of brute-forcing their way into getting one, checked their IPs - saw similarities and thought up a solution to it by making sure that accounts had to be older than one week old, and have purchased something to be able to play with them, as a means of abetting this surge.
Should have been in place from the get go, I hope they increase the restrictions for the Machine when it comes out.
Exactly this. The scalpers have had practice with Pokémon and Magic cards to know how to bot scrape websites and mass buy with different accounts. However, they still need to go to the same area for the scalper to pick it up and I doubt scalpers use VPNs due to regional taxes and price conversion differences.
Is that time limited or something? What I'd you want two to have a spare or for LANs? Hell, I play a lot of emulated games in couch co-op with my brother, so if I was ordering this, I'd order two regardless.
I get wanting to fuck over scalpers, but this seems like a step too far in the opposite direction.
The whole business of scalping in a cancer whether on this, or Pokemon cards, or hell you see it on expensive sports cars now. So all the scalpers can die in a pond of Indian sewage.
Still, while it looks fine I can't see why I'd spend $100 on it unless it's manufactured in the US or has a spectacular warranty. I was fooled more than once by expensive controllers going wrong. Buying from a scalper? No thanks.
What do the giant squares, that are where human fingertips would normally go, do?
Touch pads. Fully customisable in what they can do. They can emulate mouse movement, joystick, buttons, a hybrid of all 3 or anything else.
damn that's pretty neat
Eh, I still have an original Steam controller and only used it for about a day because the touchpad thing was just not doing it for me at all.
Those look like they would be really easy to accidentally bump while using the analog sticks.
They are a bit lower so they keep out of the way, but I ordered one and will come report to you when I have it
Bookmarking your promise.
Thank you!
It is indeed lowered and during normal use you won't be touching the trackpads. The only accidental touching of the touchpad would be when you try to push the options button that is between them but you won't be using that one while playing.
Vale et fortuna tibi adsit!
i imagine they're some kind of touch analog stick