Valve did a switcharoo on scalpers
(store.steampowered.com)
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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.