Valve Corporation, the eminent creator of Steam(a video game distribution software) and Steam Controller held the online pre-order registration for their upcoming handheld gaming device, called Steam Deck on July 16th, 2020.
The registration on Friday was much awaited by video gaming enthusiasts and sadly, opportunists and scalpers alike.
(Image credit: businessinsider.com)
WHAT’S SO SPECIAL?
Steam Deck is a handheld gaming device set out to be the best in its class, both in the terms of innovation and performance as well. The device is special in its category. Although there has been a lot of powerful handheld gaming devices in the past all of them struggled with either game support or reliability, e.g. Nintendo Switch OLED which is a great device but struggles with a limited number of titles to play. Valve Steam with its humongous library of games and an affordable price tag(starts at $399) is set out to prove unprecedented numbers of units sold which can be observed by people’s enthusiasm. Targeting this enthusiasm a lot of opportunists and scalpers come into play on sites like eBay.
Pre-Orders
Valve opened the pre-order registration at 10 A.M. PDT(Pacific Daylight Time) on its website. To prevent scalpers from registering for multiple units from multiple accounts, Valve carefully instituted some preventive measures. Only Steam accounts that had been created and made a purchase before June 2021 were eligible to test their destiny on the first slot of pre-orders. Each account was limited to register for 1 unit. Additionally, it was mandatory to deposit $5 for the registration.
Valve’s servers had trouble keeping up with the traffic the very minute registration went live. Some people faced glitches while registering, other during credit card transactions. Friday’s initial batch of pre-orders for the Stream Deck was sold out by 10:41 am.
Pre-Orders aftermath…
The preventative measures were not enough to prevent the scalpers and opportunists from auctioning off their pre-orders and earn some profit off of them. And that too at crazy expensive prices.
Here on eBay, the pre-orders are listed from $1000 and up to $4100 making it 1000% more expensive than the original price. But the trend shows enthusiasts are willing to pay even this ridiculous amount of money for initial pre-order units.
The first batch was expected to ship in December 2021, but now the company is hinting that it will take at least till the first quarter of next year for the pre-orders to deliver, and most probably Q2 2021.
