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Finally some requirements before scalpers do their work.
Could they not just lock the controller to the purchased account for the first 1 or 2 months? If you want to buy it for someone else you can use the gift option. Of course people could still resell it, but the people who buy the scalped controllers wouldn't be able to use it for two months, and the original account gets flagged as a scalper, and maybe banned if it's against ToS? And if you don't like your controller you can either just return it or wait out the lock-out period. But there are probably issues I'm missing.
Hardware DRM, basically. Hell no.
I would rather they do what they are doing, limit to 1 unit, and have some history prior.
I would even be OK with some level of priority by age or played hours, but I understand this is not something people would agree
I rather have a temporary DRM then not have a controller at all because of scalpers. But too each his own. The history stuff doesn't work because the scalpers already have their steam accounts from the steam deck days. Or they will now for the frame or machine. They just buy one or a few of those dumb $1 games, keep it open it for a few days, and voila you got your in good standing account. And they could just create multiple of those. And all that doesn't even matter if the scalpers are just normal steam users anyway.
Yep definitely would not have bought if they pulled something like that, as effective as it may have been to prevent scalping
We got the steam social credit score before GTA VI.
Good to know. Thanks. It's crazy they didn't do this from the beginning.
There was a full news cycle of tech folks talking about how "they are so in demand, they sold out instantly." Build the hype with free press.
Valve has enough experience with this to know exactly what they were doing.
They have like 150 people working there. I'm not sure that's more likely than they just flubbed something.
I think they wanted to leave a bunch of scalpers as bag holders. It's kinda genius. Let the scalpers go crazy buying a shitload of controllers, then later let actual consumers buy and reserve. So actual players have a reason NOT to buy from the inflated scalpers, and the scalpers are left with a bunch of controllers they can't sell because everyone is buying them at fair price.
And the scalpers will have a hard time buying up the second stock, because many of them likely already blew a lot of money the first time, and the second time will require a lot of bottery that will be even more expensive to try and pull off.
There is no way that this is why.
Sure, but a decent side effect.
If I remember correctly they did setup a similar reservation system for the Steamdeck when it came out?
They set it up for the Index before then
Whooo!!! That’s really good news for me, I was bummed to miss out on the first drop
this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
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