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"Steam Controller ran out faster than we anticipated" Valve say, surprising no one, promising to get more stock in
(www.rockpapershotgun.com)
this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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Aren't most of those scalpers?
Wish Valve has some kind of system that may prioritize users with certain account age or activity rather than free-for-all that can be exploited by scalpers
They should go talk to the company that sold the Steam Deck. That company had it figured out.
It would be insanely easy since they're sold thru the steam store.
Like, I don't know if there's a limit, but if someone ordered a huge amount it would hopefully flag it.
For stuff like this, I'd support one per account with recent activity. Then once supply catches up, open it up to whatever
I mean they could check a lot of things. Verified purchases. Account age. Time spent gaming. Any barrier to entry, no matter how small, would stop the majority of scalping.
Require an account three months old, at least one verified purchase in the past year, ten hours played across any title(s).
I'm pretty sure 100% of real customers would hit each of those and nearly 0% of scalpers.
Most of this was already implemented. Valve required accounts to be at least 1 year old with at least one purchase. They did the same for the Steam Deck
Honestly I feel like it's too little. At the very least the first wave of Hardware should be something crazy like the account has to be at least 10 years old have at least 30 purchases total and have an average of 8 hours a week play time.
Sure there will be some legitimate people that get filtered by that but it will pretty much guarantee scalpers can't get anything in any serious volume
Oh! That's crazy then that they sold so many...
Yeah. And it's not like they're struggling to sell them...
No matter what restrictions they put, they'd sell as many as they had for sale.
Did they just let anyone buy as many as they want tho?
I read there was a limit of two per an account, but I'm not sure if it was enforced.
It was, I was capped at 2
There are rumors it was 2 per a cart, so the same account could buy two, multiple times.
Not a rumor it’s a fact and why we got screwed.
There's been no credible proof shown yet.
Search Steam controller on ebay. Set minimum price for msrp.
There are hundreds.
I hope valve finds them and cancels their orders and bans everything about them.
Scalpers are scum.
So I checked this out, because a few people have said there are a ton of listings on ebay.
On ebay.de, searching for "Steam Controller 2026" in the EU there are three results, along with a bunch of old controllers and unrelated stuff. ebay.com has less than 20 results (plus a bunch of unrelated stuff again).
Where do people see all these?
Just searching for "Steam Controller," not changing any other filters I get 500+ results and 2k+ results, but almost all of these are the old controllers, other 3rd party controllers, Steam Links, accessories, etc. Do people just take those numbers and think there really are so many scalpers?
When I just search exactly just steam controller, then filter price to over 100 usd, there's several hundred results, some of which are the original one, but the vast majority are the new one. Don't put 2026 in the search, that's not how scalpers think.
Try ebay.com, rather than .de? A lot of the listings I saw were from Australia.
It's basically the same.
Just searching "Steam Controller," minimum price $100, item location worldwide, sending to some zip code in Los Angeles (originally it was set to Germany), I get like 400+ listings, but less than 25 of the new controllers. All the others are the old ones, those Hori licensed Steam controllers, Steam Links, 3rd party controllers, flight sim stuff, etc. (I stopped scrolling after page 4, since the new controllers stopped very quickly).
Shipping from Australia makes sense (which I also see), since there seems to have been not as big of an interest there. I saw posts mentioning how they casually grabbed one, hours after launch with no fuss there.
Yeah same. Just checked again, nowhere near as many listings. Maybe it was all one person and they got banned
I’m laughing switch it to recently sold on eBay.com good 40+ sold at $200-350 a pop. By the time the next wave comes they are coming in force with profits like that. Gonna be a long summer of stock alerts.
😖
While there are some scalpers, there is 0 evidence to the claim that "most" sales are for scalpers. Quit spreading misinformation.
curiously, I'm not claiming anything, I was simply asking which you have provided the answer to, there's no real evidence that they are scalpers. Thank you.
That's what Nintendo did and everyone cried about it.
Welcome to the threadiverse BTW
thanks man, take some getting used to with these instances, got confused a lot lol
It sure does.