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Yeah, this is a promising solution to scalping. Previously, if you had only small numbers of consoles available at launch, scalpers and their bots would claim a

Yeah, this is a promising solution to scalping. Previously, if you had only small numbers of consoles available at launch, scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them. With Valve's new policy, that share is reduced to s/g, where s is the number of verified Steam accounts controlled by scalpers and g is the number of legit gamer accounts. Since s is likely to be much less than g, s/g is close to zero, and scalping is dramatically curtailed. Almost all of the initial batch of consoles will go to legit gamers.

baggy_trough 4mo ago
Scalping is a good thing, because it gets consoles in the hands of those who want them the most, as evidenced by willingness to pay.
- geon 4mo ago
  Absolutely no one needs a steam machine.
- jcurtis 4mo ago
  This would only make sense if everyone has equal ability to pay.
  - welshwelsh 4mo ago
    You're right. It's not just aboutwillingness to pay, but also how much someone deserves to own a Steam Machine, which we determine by their ability to pay. It's not a perfect system, but money is how we as a society determine how to allocate scarce resources. People labor under the promise that having additional money will give them an advantage in this type of situation.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - Escapado 4mo ago
      Sounds like you love unregulated free capitalism but correct me if I am wrong. If that’s the case I wonder if you would see things differently if said system strongly disadvantaged you and your loved ones in other areas (health care, housing, education). I think if we derive “deserving” solely by “ability to pay” we loose our humanity.
    - Dylan16807 4mo ago
      People labor so they can buy stuff in general, mostly at normal pricing. Nobody labors for the edge case of paying off a scalper to get something, and that situation's mostly going to cause bitterness that they had to work extra because the scalper inflated the price.
- AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
  If that's what you actually wanted then Valve could just sell them at auction and at least have the money going to the company actually making the thing instead of a useless middleman. Moreover, that's what happens anyway. If you get one of the slots and you value the difference between what you paid and the "real" (resale) price more than you value having the console, you can still sell it. But then more of the money goes to ordinary customers rather than rewarding people who snipe with bots etc. I would also point out that you can build a PC to run SteamOS with approximately the same specs for approximately the same price, so it's not clear who is going to be paying a significant premium over the sticker price instead of doing that if they don't get a slot.
  - welshwelsh 4mo ago
    That is precisely what Valve should do. It is unfortunate that we need scalpers, simply because companies are bizarrely unwilling to adjust their pricing based on market conditions.
    - bjt 4mo ago
      It's not that bizarre. Not everyone is trying to optimize for maximum profit. Some creators or companies want to build a community by increasing the consumer surplus received by their buyers. They are willing to trade profit for that. Scalpers slip into the middle, take the surplus for themselves, and prevent the community building or other social goods that the seller is trying to create.
    - mywittyname 4mo ago
      > bizarrely unwilling to adjust their pricing based on market conditions. When they do this, customers have a conniption. This works fine for luxury goods, because the whole point is that they are expensive, thus exclusive (see: Porsche, Rolex). But for regular goods, this ends up being penny wise, pound foolish. Yeah, there's a short-term bump in revenues and profits, but it gives competition a massive attack surface, as they can pull away the most loyal customers who are angry over price gouging, and those customers are probably lost forever.
- plagiarist 4mo ago
  A sound economic theory after we grant the assumption that all consumers have equal amounts of money.
  - anthonyrstevens 4mo ago
    On a scale of zero to Elon Musk, consumers all have approximately equal amounts of money /s
- ranger207 4mo ago
  If you can't see the human effects scalping has on the market, then, well, you might be a microeconomist
- korse 4mo ago
  You are right. Basic economic theory says nothing about distribution of value, only about creation of the most value. I don't know why your comment is grey. But... perhaps these guys are playing a longer game? Reputation has value as well and from other comments this move seems to boost reputation significantly.
- Levitz 4mo ago
  Scalping adds no value to the product. Scalping also actively damages the pricing, which is part of the product. Valve wants to sell this product at a specific price, which is targeted to an audience. By scalping and ultimately changing the price, you are hurting both the consumer, who now pays more, and the company, who doesn't see a cent of this increase and is now failing its target. Scalping also damages the demand for the product, since it creates a submarket that is volatile and unpredictable. Scalping is a bad thing because by basically any measure, a market with scalping is worse for everybody involved than one with scalping. Except for scalpers, who make money off it by making it worse for everybody else. Which is why scalpers are bad people.
  - Ferret7446 4mo ago
    Scalping provides the service of exchanging money for time, means, and/or luck. People who have no time to camp, no botting tools or skills, etc can exchange their money instead. Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market. Even in this case, there will be scalpers providing for people with more money than luck, who want a day one steam machine.
    - gs17 4mo ago
      > People who have no time to camp, no botting tools or skills, etc can exchange their money instead. But they only need to do that because of the scalpers! The scalpers aren't adding value, they're adding friction and expecting people to pay extra for it!
      - orangecat 4mo ago
        But they only need to do that because of the scalpers! Scalpers can only profitably exist when demand at the list price exceeds supply. If you could magically ban scalping, then some number of willing customers wouldn't be able to buy at any price even after jumping through all the hoops.
        4mo ago
- furyofantares 4mo ago
  Not hard to imagine minimum wage workers wanting some gaming console quite badly and being outbid by tech workers who are vaguely interested. As an adult I have rarely wanted things as badly as I did when I was a kid. But I can sure outbid them. I think you might actually be maximally wrong, as those with means have plenty of entertainment options compared to those without.
  - anthonyrstevens 4mo ago
    Your comment made me realize that it's also not hard to imagine we could be a few short years away from a benevolent AI tasked with setting the market and selectively selling to individuals who, as a group, embody some ideal distribution for the company.
- krabizzwainch 4mo ago
  Something that only benefits people with the most disposable income is a bad thing. I will preach from any platform that I have that scalpers are shit people.
  - nrb 4mo ago
    Save some shade for people who are buying from the scalpers too.
- numpad0 4mo ago
  Some people argues that, but that's not how scalping works because it first chokes the supply to create a fake demand. The scalper listing prices don't represent the true price on supply-demand curve had there not been artificial meddling through published MSRP, but merely how forcefully they managed to choke the life of the product. They buy up ALL the stocks. Then puts them on auction sites after supply had hit as close to zero as possible. That's not how economics work by the books.
- mattjoyce 4mo ago
  Scalper:by increasing prices we add the value of enabling people to express their desire more faithfully.
- Snacklive 4mo ago
  That's just bad ragebait
gdhkgdhkvff 4mo ago
So what you’re saying is we should see an increase in account hijacks and spamming account creation as scalpers now try to optimize for max s. Show me the incentive structure and…
- abnercoimbre 4mo ago
  Spamming account creation won't work, because accounts need to have been created in April or earlier. They also verify address, payment method etc. to reduce double-dipping.
  - 10000truths 4mo ago
    > Spamming account creation won't work, because accounts need to have been created in April or earlier. Pre-creating "sleeper" accounts is a common way of circumventing this, though it does require a degree of long term thinking/planning.
    - abnercoimbre 4mo ago
      Oh yeah I remember reading that in a book about botnets. Valve can only do harm reduction here, but calculating actors will seep through.
    - idiotsecant 4mo ago
      Then s/g still applies
    - mywittyname 4mo ago
      There's probably more to it than that, and Valve just isn't telling us all the details. It's likely they are weighting accounts that have a lot of (recent) game activity and game purchases as well. Plus, they have access to hardware information via their hardware survey, etc.
      - BlueTemplar 4mo ago
        It's certainly possible that Valve is not being truthful about the lottery. (Would that be illegal for them to do ?)
hiccuphippo 4mo ago
This is also possible because they are only selling through their website, while other consoles go through retailers. I'd actually prefer a retailer just for doing this over one that was first come first serve.
- RandallBrown 4mo ago
  When the Xbox 360 came out decades ago, the store I got mine from did this. They had like 10 consoles and there were like 200 people there. They did a raffle for the consoles and I got to buy one. It felt like I won the Xbox even though I still had to pay for it.
  - transcriptase 4mo ago
    I never thought much of the need for trigger warnings until I read “the Xbox 360 came out decades ago”
    - mvcosta91 4mo ago
      The original Crysis will be TWENTY YEARS OLD in 2027.
      - kube-system 4mo ago
        And I still can't afford a GPU to play it
        Hamuko 4mo ago
        Don’t worry, you also can’t afford RAM to play it either. Not that it needs much.
      - Fuzzwah 4mo ago
        30th anniversary of Quake's release today.
inigyou 4mo ago
Fusion Festival (happening this week), aka European Burning Man (but not exactly) does this.
- arw0n 4mo ago
  And the soccer WC went the opposite direction, by encouraging scalping, giving it an official avenue, and taking a cut of the profits. Now only rich people get to enjoy a sport meant for the masses, yay.
  - buellerbueller 4mo ago
    FIFA is corrupt, so this shouldn't be a surprise.
    - ajmurmann 4mo ago
      To be fair, if FIFA wanted to maximize profits, they should auction tickets off instead of allowing scalpers to eat the delta between sales price and real value.
      - InitialLastName 4mo ago
        To be fair, GP said that FIFA is corrupt, not that FIFA is either profit-maximizing nor out to light the goose that lays the golden egg on fire. I know it's hard to imagine in the US, what with our quarterly-profit-maximizing corruption, but it is possible to be corrupt and still have to balance long-term concerns like "keep the graft flowing".
      - inigyou 4mo ago
        To be fair, most of the scalpers are FIFA.
      - dspillett 4mo ago
        The trick to getting away with being corrupt is to as corrupt as you can without your marks/customers/voters/whatever revolting¹. Switching ticket sales to an auction format would likely add enough friction that many people² wouldn't bother, bringing the price back down, or would make a very public noise about how unfair it feels. -------- [1] or authorities taking action, but that usually comes after the marks/customers/voters/whatever speaking up loud enough, unless by “taking action” you mean “taking a piece of the action” by way of being corruptible themselves. [2] from those who do, or might in future, play along with the current race-to-buy-at-fixed-teered-rates system.
ajmurmann 4mo ago
Does it solve scalping? It seems like there is still money in sighing up with the goal to resell. Granted this is better in that I don't have to race the scalpers. Till the sales price matches the market value scalping will exist. The best way to address that is a vickery auction. Till then scalping will continue.
- nehal3m 4mo ago
  I think account age and activity should be weighted into that equation.
  - Gooblebrai 4mo ago
    That crosses the line to elitism
    - gambiting 4mo ago
      Maybe, but I don't think it's totally outrageous to say the very first batch of these you can only buy if you had an account for at least 15 years or you must have spent at least $1000 over its lifetime. Then after that first batch it's free for all.
      - fartcoin67 4mo ago
        [dead]
    - nehal3m 4mo ago
      Maybe weighted is the wrong term, it’s a threshold and that seems prudent.
    - bluescrn 4mo ago
      Nah, just rewarding loyalty
  - gs17 4mo ago
    I want to agree, but it's hard to figure out what's fair, and I doubt Valve has enough verified data to make it fair right now even if we had a good rule for it. Each way I can think of (account age, gameplay time, games owned, past event participation) has a big issue. Same issue for the Steam Frame, I'd personally love if they weighed my VR time to bump me up the queue, but at the same time it feels like a "the rich get richer" kind of unfairness.
numpad0 4mo ago
It's surprising that the whole Western world is discovering the threat of organized or scripted scalping just now, when it's been a problem in places like Japan for over a decade. Account age requirements, lotteries, quick subject matter quizzes to chase away hired line-sitters, hidden ID code on tickets to ban scalpers on auction site pics, randomized queues for sales page etc etc has all been in use for years. It's been so commonplace that various city-run COVID free vaccine programs had different forms of them.
- swiftcoder 4mo ago
  It's been a problem in the West for decades too, for some reason we've only just decided to do something about it
- chorizo 4mo ago
  Organized/scripted scalping isn’t new at all in the Western world. Just look at concert/game tickets. It assumed that if you really need it, you’ll alarm clock the release and even then might end up paying a scalper.
  - numpad0 4mo ago
    Scalpers targeted products sometimes don't last one full seconds. Which means they go from product page -> cart -> checkout -> payment in fractions of a second each, likely through JS injection. It's hardly Selenium speeds. Your alarm clock or Valorant skills are of absolutely no use. That had been the norm for years where scalping has been a problem.
  - BlueTemplar 4mo ago
    Concert/game tickets are in a extremely different situation. SM doesn't become completely worthless past a certain (near, known) date.
oh_no 4mo ago
so i think you're a bit off. it's s/g but g is legit accounts who want to buy the steam machine. we could say it's 5000 scalper accounts, and 50000000 gamer accounts. but it's not 5000/50000000, it's like 4500/20000. which isn't bad! but scalpers will still be way over-represented, because they'll be trying to buy it when most steam accounts won't. now one fuzz factor is the queue system, as you're not putting down money to get in line i expect a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise sign up will, in case they decide to buy one when given the chance. so we might have 40000 gamer sign ups, but only 50% will pull the trigger. this also gives scalpers an out should the resale not be worth it. (obviously all numbers made up)
- kbenson 4mo ago
  The lower g is, the lower the profit margin for s is, so so the fewer resources they will put into it. Unless there's unlikely to be more releases later or g are not cost sensitive and want it at a premium, this neatly scales to lower numbers.
- SXX 4mo ago
  Scalpers can be damned because Valce might just deprioritize accounts in lottery unless they already spent money on Steam and play games.
  - munk-a 4mo ago
    I am sure that Valve has some analytics they can lean on to try and measure how likely it is for an account to be a scalper/trading bot and it's also quite convenient for them that if they're describing their system as random they can sneak in some biases to help steer towards real accounts without making it easy for scalpers to glean what specific attributes they're weighting.
  - jfim 4mo ago
    Yeah, I hope there's a gradient between scalper buying a single 99 cent game and actual person who has time played on multiple games and multiple purchases. The probability of someone with say a 3000 hours played across multiple games with hundreds or thousands of dollars of purchases is far less likely to be a scalper than someone with a single purchase many years ago and maybe some completely f2p play in say dota/cs, since the latter is likely to be a bot account.
ocdtrekkie 4mo ago
Scalping is much easier to solve, people just wouldn't like it: Lock the device to the purchasing Steam account for a year.
- drnick1 4mo ago
  It's just a PC, you shouldn't be able to "lock" it. Either you own the hardware or you don't.
  - ocdtrekkie 4mo ago
    It's a PC everyone expects to play games from a proprietary platform with an account system. They absolutely could lock how it’s used similar to how cell phones are locked with carriers today. And it would eliminate scalping. But as I said, you don't like it. ;) Scalping is freedom, if you want to remove scalping, you have to remove some freedom.
    - anthonyrstevens 4mo ago
      >> But as I said, you don't like it "Truth in advertising" in your OP :)
    - hananova 4mo ago
      I personally wouldn't call it a loss of freedom. You could put another OS on it, without limitations. You just wouldn't be able to log into steam unless it's the correct account, just like steam refuses logins from hardware banned devices and banned accounts.
  - hananova 4mo ago
    Presumably Valve could record all the serial numbers at the factory and simply block steam logins from accounts don't own a steam machine for the first year or so. The hardware wouldn't be locked, it'd just be steam that refuses to allow logins from the wrong account, steam already sends over your hardware id during the login process so they definitely could use it. And yes, it's not hard to spoof your hardware id, but who is going to buy a machine at scalper prices only to then need to run sketchy software to even be able to use it. It'd completely kill the scalping market and not affect anyone buying one to use.
user142 4mo ago
> scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them Is there any actual data on this? I know people don't like scalpers but I wonder what the actual percentage is.
lmm 4mo ago
Japan has done this for concert tickets for years. It works great.
fdye 4mo ago
I've never understood why anti-scalpers just don't work backwards from shipping address. Are these scalpers all really keeping hundreds of actual physical addresses they can receive packages at? Like if you see the limited product has 100 orders going to the same building, or apartment, or whatever then flag it before it goes out. Limit PO Boxes, etc. Sure they can find mules to buy+receive one and then sell to the scalper, but the more steps you put in the better. Same for the people scamming Sam's club by buying memberships, ordering limited items, then refunding the membership. Just lock orders to members older then >1yr and make sure it only ships to the actual physical address attached to the membership. Flag multiple memberships at the same address. I've run a modest shipping op and the second I saw even a couple orders of the same product going to the same address I would halt it and do additional verification.
- dehugger 4mo ago
  The answer is that once you move past a modest shipping op the people with actual visibility on that would be the warehouse that's fulfilling, also typically people who don't have the power to cancel orders themselves. Ecomm orders want to drop to the distribution center as soon as possible, which means you can't wait until you have a whole bunch of them just so you can analyze which addresses are on multiple orders. You would either need to 1) detect this in the warehouse systems (I spent my career working on these, so I can say with high certainty that is almost definitely Not going to happen, especially if they go through a 3PL) OR 2) you have to cancel orders after they have already dropped to the warehouse (which means wasted labor in the best-case scenario). None of that is worth the effort to a company who is fundamentally still getting paid the same for the product regardless of if the purchaser is a scalper or not.
  - nmstoker 4mo ago
    Why would any people need to see the addresses at all? The solution being proposed is something that you'd automate with a series of heuristics. And your point about the company making the same money for shipping to scalpers vs non scalpers seems like it would only apply to the shipping company, but if you view from the perspective of the product company, obviously they have an incentive to avoid scalpers because it negatively impacts the brand and the price spikes are money not captured by the product company and may even reduce further spending (eg if a buyer spaffed half their budget on an overpriced console, that's less for buying games which benefit the product company, eg Steam in this case)
HerbManic 4mo ago
[dead]
dismalaf 4mo ago
Scalping? What kind of scalping market will there be at these prices?
soerxpso 4mo ago
I would be careful granting that s is less than g. There are lots of incentives other than scalping for people to create extra illegitimate accounts on Steam, and one individual can often control hundreds of bots, whereas a legitimate user almost never has more than one or two accounts.
- moffkalast 4mo ago
  Even with a hundred or a thousand bots per person you'd need a hell of a lot of scalpers to dwarf Steam's ~130 million active human users.

baggy_trough 4mo ago

Scalping is a good thing, because it gets consoles in the hands of those who want them the most, as evidenced by willingness to pay.

geon 4mo ago
Absolutely no one needs a steam machine.
jcurtis 4mo ago
This would only make sense if everyone has equal ability to pay.
- welshwelsh 4mo ago
  You're right. It's not just aboutwillingness to pay, but also how much someone deserves to own a Steam Machine, which we determine by their ability to pay. It's not a perfect system, but money is how we as a society determine how to allocate scarce resources. People labor under the promise that having additional money will give them an advantage in this type of situation.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Escapado 4mo ago
    Sounds like you love unregulated free capitalism but correct me if I am wrong. If that’s the case I wonder if you would see things differently if said system strongly disadvantaged you and your loved ones in other areas (health care, housing, education). I think if we derive “deserving” solely by “ability to pay” we loose our humanity.
  - Dylan16807 4mo ago
    People labor so they can buy stuff in general, mostly at normal pricing. Nobody labors for the edge case of paying off a scalper to get something, and that situation's mostly going to cause bitterness that they had to work extra because the scalper inflated the price.
AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
If that's what you actually wanted then Valve could just sell them at auction and at least have the money going to the company actually making the thing instead of a useless middleman. Moreover, that's what happens anyway. If you get one of the slots and you value the difference between what you paid and the "real" (resale) price more than you value having the console, you can still sell it. But then more of the money goes to ordinary customers rather than rewarding people who snipe with bots etc. I would also point out that you can build a PC to run SteamOS with approximately the same specs for approximately the same price, so it's not clear who is going to be paying a significant premium over the sticker price instead of doing that if they don't get a slot.
- welshwelsh 4mo ago
  That is precisely what Valve should do. It is unfortunate that we need scalpers, simply because companies are bizarrely unwilling to adjust their pricing based on market conditions.
  - bjt 4mo ago
    It's not that bizarre. Not everyone is trying to optimize for maximum profit. Some creators or companies want to build a community by increasing the consumer surplus received by their buyers. They are willing to trade profit for that. Scalpers slip into the middle, take the surplus for themselves, and prevent the community building or other social goods that the seller is trying to create.
  - mywittyname 4mo ago
    > bizarrely unwilling to adjust their pricing based on market conditions. When they do this, customers have a conniption. This works fine for luxury goods, because the whole point is that they are expensive, thus exclusive (see: Porsche, Rolex). But for regular goods, this ends up being penny wise, pound foolish. Yeah, there's a short-term bump in revenues and profits, but it gives competition a massive attack surface, as they can pull away the most loyal customers who are angry over price gouging, and those customers are probably lost forever.
plagiarist 4mo ago
A sound economic theory after we grant the assumption that all consumers have equal amounts of money.
- anthonyrstevens 4mo ago
  On a scale of zero to Elon Musk, consumers all have approximately equal amounts of money /s
ranger207 4mo ago
If you can't see the human effects scalping has on the market, then, well, you might be a microeconomist
korse 4mo ago
You are right. Basic economic theory says nothing about distribution of value, only about creation of the most value. I don't know why your comment is grey. But... perhaps these guys are playing a longer game? Reputation has value as well and from other comments this move seems to boost reputation significantly.
Levitz 4mo ago
Scalping adds no value to the product. Scalping also actively damages the pricing, which is part of the product. Valve wants to sell this product at a specific price, which is targeted to an audience. By scalping and ultimately changing the price, you are hurting both the consumer, who now pays more, and the company, who doesn't see a cent of this increase and is now failing its target. Scalping also damages the demand for the product, since it creates a submarket that is volatile and unpredictable. Scalping is a bad thing because by basically any measure, a market with scalping is worse for everybody involved than one with scalping. Except for scalpers, who make money off it by making it worse for everybody else. Which is why scalpers are bad people.
- Ferret7446 4mo ago
  Scalping provides the service of exchanging money for time, means, and/or luck. People who have no time to camp, no botting tools or skills, etc can exchange their money instead. Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market. Even in this case, there will be scalpers providing for people with more money than luck, who want a day one steam machine.
  - gs17 4mo ago
    > People who have no time to camp, no botting tools or skills, etc can exchange their money instead. But they only need to do that because of the scalpers! The scalpers aren't adding value, they're adding friction and expecting people to pay extra for it!
    - orangecat 4mo ago
      But they only need to do that because of the scalpers! Scalpers can only profitably exist when demand at the list price exceeds supply. If you could magically ban scalping, then some number of willing customers wouldn't be able to buy at any price even after jumping through all the hoops.
      - 4mo ago
furyofantares 4mo ago
Not hard to imagine minimum wage workers wanting some gaming console quite badly and being outbid by tech workers who are vaguely interested. As an adult I have rarely wanted things as badly as I did when I was a kid. But I can sure outbid them. I think you might actually be maximally wrong, as those with means have plenty of entertainment options compared to those without.
- anthonyrstevens 4mo ago
  Your comment made me realize that it's also not hard to imagine we could be a few short years away from a benevolent AI tasked with setting the market and selectively selling to individuals who, as a group, embody some ideal distribution for the company.
krabizzwainch 4mo ago
Something that only benefits people with the most disposable income is a bad thing. I will preach from any platform that I have that scalpers are shit people.
- nrb 4mo ago
  Save some shade for people who are buying from the scalpers too.
numpad0 4mo ago
Some people argues that, but that's not how scalping works because it first chokes the supply to create a fake demand. The scalper listing prices don't represent the true price on supply-demand curve had there not been artificial meddling through published MSRP, but merely how forcefully they managed to choke the life of the product. They buy up ALL the stocks. Then puts them on auction sites after supply had hit as close to zero as possible. That's not how economics work by the books.
mattjoyce 4mo ago
Scalper:by increasing prices we add the value of enabling people to express their desire more faithfully.
Snacklive 4mo ago
That's just bad ragebait

gdhkgdhkvff 4mo ago

So what you’re saying is we should see an increase in account hijacks and spamming account creation as scalpers now try to optimize for max s. Show me the incentive structure and…

abnercoimbre 4mo ago
Spamming account creation won't work, because accounts need to have been created in April or earlier. They also verify address, payment method etc. to reduce double-dipping.
- 10000truths 4mo ago
  > Spamming account creation won't work, because accounts need to have been created in April or earlier. Pre-creating "sleeper" accounts is a common way of circumventing this, though it does require a degree of long term thinking/planning.
  - abnercoimbre 4mo ago
    Oh yeah I remember reading that in a book about botnets. Valve can only do harm reduction here, but calculating actors will seep through.
  - idiotsecant 4mo ago
    Then s/g still applies
  - mywittyname 4mo ago
    There's probably more to it than that, and Valve just isn't telling us all the details. It's likely they are weighting accounts that have a lot of (recent) game activity and game purchases as well. Plus, they have access to hardware information via their hardware survey, etc.
    - BlueTemplar 4mo ago
      It's certainly possible that Valve is not being truthful about the lottery. (Would that be illegal for them to do ?)

hiccuphippo 4mo ago

This is also possible because they are only selling through their website, while other consoles go through retailers. I'd actually prefer a retailer just for doing this over one that was first come first serve.

RandallBrown 4mo ago
When the Xbox 360 came out decades ago, the store I got mine from did this. They had like 10 consoles and there were like 200 people there. They did a raffle for the consoles and I got to buy one. It felt like I won the Xbox even though I still had to pay for it.
- transcriptase 4mo ago
  I never thought much of the need for trigger warnings until I read “the Xbox 360 came out decades ago”
  - mvcosta91 4mo ago
    The original Crysis will be TWENTY YEARS OLD in 2027.
    - kube-system 4mo ago
      And I still can't afford a GPU to play it
      - Hamuko 4mo ago
        Don’t worry, you also can’t afford RAM to play it either. Not that it needs much.
    - Fuzzwah 4mo ago
      30th anniversary of Quake's release today.

inigyou 4mo ago

Fusion Festival (happening this week), aka European Burning Man (but not exactly) does this.

arw0n 4mo ago
And the soccer WC went the opposite direction, by encouraging scalping, giving it an official avenue, and taking a cut of the profits. Now only rich people get to enjoy a sport meant for the masses, yay.
- buellerbueller 4mo ago
  FIFA is corrupt, so this shouldn't be a surprise.
  - ajmurmann 4mo ago
    To be fair, if FIFA wanted to maximize profits, they should auction tickets off instead of allowing scalpers to eat the delta between sales price and real value.
    - InitialLastName 4mo ago
      To be fair, GP said that FIFA is corrupt, not that FIFA is either profit-maximizing nor out to light the goose that lays the golden egg on fire. I know it's hard to imagine in the US, what with our quarterly-profit-maximizing corruption, but it is possible to be corrupt and still have to balance long-term concerns like "keep the graft flowing".
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      To be fair, most of the scalpers are FIFA.
    - dspillett 4mo ago
      The trick to getting away with being corrupt is to as corrupt as you can without your marks/customers/voters/whatever revolting¹. Switching ticket sales to an auction format would likely add enough friction that many people² wouldn't bother, bringing the price back down, or would make a very public noise about how unfair it feels. -------- [1] or authorities taking action, but that usually comes after the marks/customers/voters/whatever speaking up loud enough, unless by “taking action” you mean “taking a piece of the action” by way of being corruptible themselves. [2] from those who do, or might in future, play along with the current race-to-buy-at-fixed-teered-rates system.

ajmurmann 4mo ago

Does it solve scalping? It seems like there is still money in sighing up with the goal to resell. Granted this is better in that I don't have to race the scalpers. Till the sales price matches the market value scalping will exist. The best way to address that is a vickery auction. Till then scalping will continue.

nehal3m 4mo ago
I think account age and activity should be weighted into that equation.
- Gooblebrai 4mo ago
  That crosses the line to elitism
  - gambiting 4mo ago
    Maybe, but I don't think it's totally outrageous to say the very first batch of these you can only buy if you had an account for at least 15 years or you must have spent at least $1000 over its lifetime. Then after that first batch it's free for all.
    - fartcoin67 4mo ago
      [dead]
  - nehal3m 4mo ago
    Maybe weighted is the wrong term, it’s a threshold and that seems prudent.
  - bluescrn 4mo ago
    Nah, just rewarding loyalty
- gs17 4mo ago
  I want to agree, but it's hard to figure out what's fair, and I doubt Valve has enough verified data to make it fair right now even if we had a good rule for it. Each way I can think of (account age, gameplay time, games owned, past event participation) has a big issue. Same issue for the Steam Frame, I'd personally love if they weighed my VR time to bump me up the queue, but at the same time it feels like a "the rich get richer" kind of unfairness.

numpad0 4mo ago

It's surprising that the whole Western world is discovering the threat of organized or scripted scalping just now, when it's been a problem in places like Japan for over a decade. Account age requirements, lotteries, quick subject matter quizzes to chase away hired line-sitters, hidden ID code on tickets to ban scalpers on auction site pics, randomized queues for sales page etc etc has all been in use for years. It's been so commonplace that various city-run COVID free vaccine programs had different forms of them.

swiftcoder 4mo ago
It's been a problem in the West for decades too, for some reason we've only just decided to do something about it
chorizo 4mo ago
Organized/scripted scalping isn’t new at all in the Western world. Just look at concert/game tickets. It assumed that if you really need it, you’ll alarm clock the release and even then might end up paying a scalper.
- numpad0 4mo ago
  Scalpers targeted products sometimes don't last one full seconds. Which means they go from product page -> cart -> checkout -> payment in fractions of a second each, likely through JS injection. It's hardly Selenium speeds. Your alarm clock or Valorant skills are of absolutely no use. That had been the norm for years where scalping has been a problem.
- BlueTemplar 4mo ago
  Concert/game tickets are in a extremely different situation. SM doesn't become completely worthless past a certain (near, known) date.

oh_no 4mo ago

so i think you're a bit off. it's s/g but g is legit accounts who want to buy the steam machine. we could say it's 5000 scalper accounts, and 50000000 gamer accounts. but it's not 5000/50000000, it's like 4500/20000. which isn't bad! but scalpers will still be way over-represented, because they'll be trying to buy it when most steam accounts won't. now one fuzz factor is the queue system, as you're not putting down money to get in line i expect a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise sign up will, in case they decide to buy one when given the chance. so we might have 40000 gamer sign ups, but only 50% will pull the trigger. this also gives scalpers an out should the resale not be worth it. (obviously all numbers made up)

kbenson 4mo ago
The lower g is, the lower the profit margin for s is, so so the fewer resources they will put into it. Unless there's unlikely to be more releases later or g are not cost sensitive and want it at a premium, this neatly scales to lower numbers.
SXX 4mo ago
Scalpers can be damned because Valce might just deprioritize accounts in lottery unless they already spent money on Steam and play games.
- munk-a 4mo ago
  I am sure that Valve has some analytics they can lean on to try and measure how likely it is for an account to be a scalper/trading bot and it's also quite convenient for them that if they're describing their system as random they can sneak in some biases to help steer towards real accounts without making it easy for scalpers to glean what specific attributes they're weighting.
- jfim 4mo ago
  Yeah, I hope there's a gradient between scalper buying a single 99 cent game and actual person who has time played on multiple games and multiple purchases. The probability of someone with say a 3000 hours played across multiple games with hundreds or thousands of dollars of purchases is far less likely to be a scalper than someone with a single purchase many years ago and maybe some completely f2p play in say dota/cs, since the latter is likely to be a bot account.

ocdtrekkie 4mo ago

Scalping is much easier to solve, people just wouldn't like it: Lock the device to the purchasing Steam account for a year.

drnick1 4mo ago
It's just a PC, you shouldn't be able to "lock" it. Either you own the hardware or you don't.
- ocdtrekkie 4mo ago
  It's a PC everyone expects to play games from a proprietary platform with an account system. They absolutely could lock how it’s used similar to how cell phones are locked with carriers today. And it would eliminate scalping. But as I said, you don't like it. ;) Scalping is freedom, if you want to remove scalping, you have to remove some freedom.
  - anthonyrstevens 4mo ago
    >> But as I said, you don't like it "Truth in advertising" in your OP :)
  - hananova 4mo ago
    I personally wouldn't call it a loss of freedom. You could put another OS on it, without limitations. You just wouldn't be able to log into steam unless it's the correct account, just like steam refuses logins from hardware banned devices and banned accounts.
- hananova 4mo ago
  Presumably Valve could record all the serial numbers at the factory and simply block steam logins from accounts don't own a steam machine for the first year or so. The hardware wouldn't be locked, it'd just be steam that refuses to allow logins from the wrong account, steam already sends over your hardware id during the login process so they definitely could use it. And yes, it's not hard to spoof your hardware id, but who is going to buy a machine at scalper prices only to then need to run sketchy software to even be able to use it. It'd completely kill the scalping market and not affect anyone buying one to use.

user142 4mo ago

> scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them Is there any actual data on this? I know people don't like scalpers but I wonder what the actual percentage is.

lmm 4mo ago

Japan has done this for concert tickets for years. It works great.

fdye 4mo ago

I've never understood why anti-scalpers just don't work backwards from shipping address. Are these scalpers all really keeping hundreds of actual physical addresses they can receive packages at? Like if you see the limited product has 100 orders going to the same building, or apartment, or whatever then flag it before it goes out. Limit PO Boxes, etc. Sure they can find mules to buy+receive one and then sell to the scalper, but the more steps you put in the better. Same for the people scamming Sam's club by buying memberships, ordering limited items, then refunding the membership. Just lock orders to members older then >1yr and make sure it only ships to the actual physical address attached to the membership. Flag multiple memberships at the same address. I've run a modest shipping op and the second I saw even a couple orders of the same product going to the same address I would halt it and do additional verification.

dehugger 4mo ago
The answer is that once you move past a modest shipping op the people with actual visibility on that would be the warehouse that's fulfilling, also typically people who don't have the power to cancel orders themselves. Ecomm orders want to drop to the distribution center as soon as possible, which means you can't wait until you have a whole bunch of them just so you can analyze which addresses are on multiple orders. You would either need to 1) detect this in the warehouse systems (I spent my career working on these, so I can say with high certainty that is almost definitely Not going to happen, especially if they go through a 3PL) OR 2) you have to cancel orders after they have already dropped to the warehouse (which means wasted labor in the best-case scenario). None of that is worth the effort to a company who is fundamentally still getting paid the same for the product regardless of if the purchaser is a scalper or not.
- nmstoker 4mo ago
  Why would any people need to see the addresses at all? The solution being proposed is something that you'd automate with a series of heuristics. And your point about the company making the same money for shipping to scalpers vs non scalpers seems like it would only apply to the shipping company, but if you view from the perspective of the product company, obviously they have an incentive to avoid scalpers because it negatively impacts the brand and the price spikes are money not captured by the product company and may even reduce further spending (eg if a buyer spaffed half their budget on an overpriced console, that's less for buying games which benefit the product company, eg Steam in this case)

HerbManic 4mo ago

[dead]

dismalaf 4mo ago

Scalping? What kind of scalping market will there be at these prices?

soerxpso 4mo ago

I would be careful granting that s is less than g. There are lots of incentives other than scalping for people to create extra illegitimate accounts on Steam, and one individual can often control hundreds of bots, whereas a legitimate user almost never has more than one or two accounts.

moffkalast 4mo ago
Even with a hundred or a thousand bots per person you'd need a hell of a lot of scalpers to dwarf Steam's ~130 million active human users.