This guy will have to wait for his younger brother.
It was available to buy starting noon local time. I refreshed the page until the buy option became available, but kept getting an error when submitting payment. Waited about half an hour and now it’s sold out. Ni modo I guess.
They did a hardware launch perfectly for the Deck - Account of minimum age needed, and a queue to buy as devices became available. Why the hell did they go with the old, shit version that only serves scalpers that use bots to scoop up every item?
Practically there wasn’t really a difference with the Steam Deck. You still had everyone rushing at the same time to get the deposit in. People got errors during the check out, just like this time and scalpers popped up immediately as well.
Sure, you might have had a few people less, trying to buy it, if you restrict by age, but the controller was announced last year. Do you want Valve to sell the first controllers only to accounts that are older than 6 months or a year? Or do you go by the time the review embargo was up, which got broken because a few reviews leaked early.
And? With the queue, people were able to continue submitting orders as things calmed down. There will always be a rush to be first. The queue handles it better by not outright denying those who didn’t make it in right away. This also reduces the FOMO that funds scalpers’ abuse of the system.
As for account age, it doesn’t really matter when it is set at - any limitation reduces the number of bots able to spam real users out of a purchase. Admittedly, that only really helps if there’s also a limit on number of units bought, which I don’t think was implemented this time, either, for whatever reason.
So headlines will say “sold out in minutes!!!” and create FOMO for the second wave. That’s my guess at least.
This doesn’t really seem like Valve’s MO
Why would you assume that is Valve’s reason
People like to add reasoning to chaos. Everything has to be planned out for some people instead of life happening and businesses do what they do naturally. Take advantage of situations when they can and make money. I like valve and plan on getting a machine or deck when they are restocked. I think it’s normal supply and demand with this one.