Valve’s handheld Steam Deck was unveiled last week and on Friday opened the possibility to pre-book. Prior to the first round of pre-bookings, Valve’s servers did not manage the horde of stakeholders ready to secure their copy and the first units that are expected to be shipped this winter quickly ran out.
The last few years have scalpers, ie persons or businesses that buys goods from retailers and then resells them more expensively, has become a common phenomenon. A combination of high demand and inadequate supply due to prevailing circuit shortages has been received scalpers to focus on everything from new game consoles to graphics cards, something that became very clear with the launch of Playstation 5 and Xbox Series S / X. It also appeared with the Nintendo Switch, most recently in connection with the launch of the latest game title in the Animal Crossing series.
Valve tried to prevent and prevent scalpers through various restrictions. For example, pre-booking takes place through the user’s Steam account and costs approximately SEK 50, which is then deducted from the console’s price. For the first two days, pre-booking could only be made by accounts that had purchased something before June 2021, which was intended to stop newly created accounts for the purpose of pre-booking. Despite this, consoles at significantly higher prices have appeared on the second-hand market.
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The consoles, which in this case consist of reservations, are mainly sold on Ebay at, to say the least, increased prices. The intermediate variants are advertised for between SEK 6,000 and 15,000, ie many thousand kronor more than the corresponding SEK 7,000 Valve charges for the most lavish Steam Deck model. It also looks like some are trying to sell accounts with reservations on. However, this violates Steam’s Terms of Use, which means that Valve can turn off the user in case of suspicion that the account has been resold.
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