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The Steam Machine is actually a great prospect — we're just looking at it wrong
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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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The hypothetical call center would be selling Steam Accounts, with... $100 in their Steam Wallets, or w/e.
Which is ... well, against Steam policy, though enforcement is spotty.
Or I guess... physical Steam Gift cards?
But that leads into the other part of this:
The call center would have to be making basically fake individual Steam Accounts for each purchased Steam Machine.
And then probably routing them to different addresses. Different home addresses.
Valve sells its hardware directly through Steam.
They ship it to you.
No stores.
Sure, secondary markets always exist, but it is at least kind of hard to like, buy 100 Steam Machines or 100 Steam Decks on one legit Steam Account, they can easily just say uh no, you get a max of 5 or 2 or whatever.
So yeah a call center could pull off buying a bunch of them, in the sense of them being a scam call center that specializes in fraud and identity theft, yeah, they'd be able to figure it out, but it would probably be decently illegal.