Update (May 8th): Valve has moved quickly. The day after this piece went live, the company published a full response acknowledging that launch day was “incredibly frustrating” for a lot of people, and outlined a reservation system that amounts to a fairly direct implementation of what this article argues for. From today at 6pm BST, you can reserve a Steam Controller on Steam.
Your place in the queue is saved, and when stock arrives you get 72 hours to complete the purchase via email. One reservation per account, no exceptions. Accounts must have made at least one Steam purchase before 27th April 2026, meaning freshly created bot accounts are locked out by design. Anyone who already bought one on launch day is ineligible for a second reservation, for now.
New stock is heading to the US and Canada first, with UK, EU, and Australia to follow in the coming weeks. It’s not a perfect solution to the supply problem, but as a set of anti-scalping measures it’s substantive rather than cosmetic. We’ll take it. You can reserve yours directly on Steam.
Full disclosure before we begin: I got one. I wasn’t sent one to review, and I don’t know someone who knows someone whose cousin Vinnie owes a favour to someone at Valve. I just happened to be on Steam at the right moment, spammed the checkout until it went through, and got lucky. I know this makes me a total bastard right now. I’m not actually sorry, but I understand completely why you’d like me to be.
I’m telling you this not to boast, but because luck is now apparently a core component of being a PC gamer who wants to buy a well-reviewed piece of hardware at the price it’s supposed to cost. That’s a problem. It’s been a problem for years. It’s getting worse. And the industry has the tools to fix it and largely chooses not to, which is the thing that should make all of us considerably angrier than we currently are.
The Steam Controller launched on 4th May 2026 in the US for $99, which works out to an £85 RRP here. It’s Valve’s first serious controller in over a decade and represents something the PC gaming community has wanted for a long time. Demand was, predictably, enormous.
It sold out in 35 minutes. Valve’s servers crashed under the load. Payment errors were rife throughout. And then, because this is 2026 and this is the world we’ve built for ourselves, the same controller reappeared on eBay within the hour. PC Gamer confirmed that confirmed pre-orders were already listed for $300, a 200% markup on Valve’s retail price. Some sellers were asking considerably more. One person, apparently having misunderstood what a joke is, listed theirs for $735,889.32. That one, at least, didn’t sell.
Valve subsequently acknowledged the situation on X: “Steam Controller ran out faster than we anticipated, and we hate that not everyone who wanted one was able to get it. We’re working on getting more in stock and will have an update on expected timeline soon.” It’s a reasonable statement. The sentiment is genuine. It does not, however, put a Steam Controller in the hands of anyone who wanted one and couldn’t get through a payment error at 6pm on a Sunday while scalping bots were busy clearing inventory.
For what it’s worth, the reviews are excellent. This isn’t a case of the community chasing hype for a mediocre product. People wanted it because it genuinely deserved to be wanted. Which makes the whole situation considerably more irritating.
I’ve been here before. Most of us have.
We’ve been here before in 2020 (Image credit: PlayStation LifeStyle)
In late 2020, Sony launched the PlayStation 5 into a world that was mostly sitting at home with nothing to do and genuinely desperate for something to be excited about. The timing, which Sony cannot have predicted with any precision, produced demand levels that would have been difficult to meet under normal manufacturing conditions.
Under COVID-disrupted supply chains, it was genuinely impossible. I got one on launch day. Again: luck, not skill, not planning. I happened to be looking at the right moment. The people who didn’t were then presented with eBay listings at two and three times the retail price and a choice between paying it, waiting indefinitely, or doing without. Thousands paid it. Thousands felt robbed immediately afterwards.
The PS5 Pro, which launched in 2024, had the distinction of being the launch where the scalpers got exactly what they deserved. The Pro launched at a price point that was already ambitious. Scalpers, operating on autopilot from their PS5 playbook, hoovered up stock and immediately listed the units at the usual obscene premiums.
What they hadn’t fully accounted for was that the Pro’s retail price came down more quickly than anticipated, retailers began discounting, and suddenly the scalpers were sitting on piles of hardware they’d paid over the odds for and couldn’t move at a profit. It was deeply satisfying to watch. I’d love to tell you it was a turning point. It wasn’t. Here we are again.
This pattern is not unique to gaming, and the comparison that keeps coming back to me is concert tickets.
If you’ve ever tried to see a major touring act in the last decade, you’ll know the experience. Tickets go on sale at 10am. By 10:02am the event is sold out. By 10:05am, tickets are on Viagogo and StubHub for four times face value. You either pay it, see a different band, or accept that you’re not going. This has become so normalised in live music that many people don’t even register it as wrong anymore. It is wrong. It is an ecosystem built on parasitism, and the argument that “it’s just the market working” is one of those arguments that is technically defensible and morally vacuous.
The gaming equivalent is identical in structure and identical in its effect on the ordinary person who simply wanted the thing and arrived five minutes too late. The tools exist to stop it. The will to use them is the variable.
What can companies actually do? Quite a lot, as it happens.
The most effective approach, deployed with notable success by Nintendo during the Switch 2 launch, is verified account purchase requirements combined with strict quantity limits. Nintendo required proof of purchase for warranty claims in Japan and limited reservations to users with verified accounts. The effect was to make bulk bot purchasing significantly harder. You can’t automate an identity verification. You can automate clicking a buy button.
Valve is actually well placed to do something similar. Every Steam account has a history: games purchased, hours logged, account age. A purchase gating system that simply requires a minimum account age and some demonstrable engagement with the platform before you can buy a new piece of Valve hardware would eliminate the burner-account bot problem almost entirely. New accounts created specifically to buy and flip a Steam Controller would fail the check automatically. Real users who’d been on Steam for a year wouldn’t notice the requirement at all.
Order quantity limits of one unit per account are obvious and should be universal for any hardware launch with anticipated high demand. Valve confirmed its stock was gone in under an hour. Anyone who bought more than one unit is not a collector.
The nuclear option, and one that frankly deserves more discussion than it gets, is region-locked purchasing tied to verified ID with resale restrictions.
Queue systems, like those used by some GPU retailers and by PlayStation Direct for PS5 restocks, are another partial solution. They don’t eliminate scalping but they distribute the pain of a queue more fairly than “whoever’s bot is fastest wins.” A random lottery for the queue itself, rather than a first-come-first-served scramble, removes the advantage that automated purchasing tools provide entirely.
The nuclear option, and one that frankly deserves more discussion than it gets, is region-locked purchasing tied to verified ID with resale restrictions. Buy the hardware, agree at point of purchase that you won’t resell it for 90 days, and forfeit warranty and account standing if you do. This is legally complicated in some jurisdictions and not in others. It would be effective. Nobody’s done it at scale in gaming because it requires effort and some legal groundwork, and it’s easier to post a sympathetic statement on X.
There’s also the approach of simply making enough of the thing. This sounds sarcastic. It isn’t entirely. Valve acknowledged that the Controller ran out faster than they anticipated, which raises the question of what production numbers they were working from and whether the years of community demand for new Valve hardware were genuinely factored in. Shortfalls of this scale, where a product is gone in 35 minutes on its launch day, are sometimes genuinely unpredictable. They are sometimes the result of production decisions that prioritised caution over supply. The difference matters.
The scalper’s standard defence is that they’re providing a service. They’re making an item available to people who can’t wait, at a price those people are willing to pay, and the free market determines the outcome. This is the argument of someone who has decided to be technically correct at the expense of being correct in any other sense.
What’s actually being provided is access to a system that was exploited. The scalper didn’t create the Steam Controller. They didn’t manufacture it, review it, or build the community enthusiasm that made it desirable. They wrote a bot, or paid someone who wrote a bot, and positioned themselves between the manufacturer and the customer to extract money for no contribution other than the extraction itself. The “service” is identical to someone buying up all the bread in a village before market day and then selling it back to the village at double the price. The market clears. The outcome is not something anyone should feel comfortable defending.
This arrived on eBay within the hour of launch. £224.30, or three Klarna payments if you’d like to be additionally humiliated. Screenshot: eBay
The ordinary gamer in this picture is someone who wanted an £85 controller, set an alarm, opened the page at the right moment, got an error message while the bots were clearing stock, refreshed for twenty minutes, saw the sold-out notice, and is now being invited to pay £200 on eBay for the same thing. That person hasn’t been served by a market mechanism. They’ve been mugged by one.
I’ll close where I started. I got a Steam Controller. It’ll arrive in the next few weeks and I’ll write something proper about it when it does. I’m glad I got it, and I’m aware that gladness is contingent on being faster than the people who were just as entitled to get one as I was. That’s not how it should work. It’s not how any of this should work.
Valve, the next one you launch: verified accounts, quantity limits, a queue, and enough stock. The community has been asking nicely for years. It hasn’t worked. Perhaps the tons of people who didn’t get a Steam Controller this week will be sufficient motivation.
I’d hate to think they went through all of this for nothing.