[ajmurmann]

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.

[Xirdus]

"Customers must meet the following criteria to be able to sign up:

    You must have a Steam account in good standing.

    You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.

    Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries."

[ajmurmann]

That prevents flooding of tickets by a single person but doesn't prevent me from signing up even though I just want to resell

[fc417fc802]

And why should that matter? If Valve wants to sell below market this is a reasonably fair system for doing so. What you do with your purchase is none of their concern.

[kodt]

You can fight scalpers by hardware limiting the device to the account that was used to purchase for some set time (2 years or so)

[jack_pp]

Sure but no one can do anything about your free will. This is about being fair, any ideas to make the system fairer?

[ajmurmann]

Scalping exists because the sales price is significantly lower than the market value. Just do a Vickery auction and scalping is gone. Because it's avickery auction the price likely wouldn't be totally ludicrous either. If there is a batch of 10,000 units sold the price would be the 10,001th highest bid.

[ncruces]

You've proposed that N times already.

Brands could do that - or an approximation of that by having an higher launch prize for the initial batch - yet they mostly don't.

Maybe the intent here is not keeping difference to themselves, and there's more brand value in not profiting from supply constraints, while being perceived as doing something about mass scalping.

Since most brands don't seem to agree with you, and if you just feel like you should be able to use your extra money to get lucky, you can still try to convince one of the lucky ones. I guess the few who might take it to eBay will charge even more for the privilege.

Not everything needs to be about efficient markets.

[ajmurmann]

Yes, there likely is a large component where the median customer would be unhappy, just like they were with Uber surge pricing despite it being a win for the median participant in any role. That's why I'm here to preach the gospel of the unfathomable beauty and efficiency of the market and capitalism that has catapulted us into the greatest time in history.

[chorizo]

In Valve’s, they’re raffling the opportunity to make a purchase. For a generalized Vickery auction, it’s assumed the buyer will complete the bid, but that’s not so in valve’s case. What’s a good solution when there is a significant % of bids that do not complete the purchase?

[ajmurmann]

You pre-authorize the charge.

[Xirdus]

If the price is not totally ludicrous then the scalpers outbid pretty much everyone else. If you know MSRP, then normal people bid MSRP whereas scalpers take a million dollar loan and bid all 10,000 units at double MSRP, then sell at triple/quadruple MSRP. If you don't know MSRP, then most people won't know how much to bid, and won't bid at all, leaving just scalpers.

[ajmurmann]

Scalpers bid high because they know they can get when more. The people who pay more to scalpers on an auction side like eBay would just bid that directly to Valve

[BlueTemplar]

> If you know MSRP

Giving a list price would make no sense in the case of an auction, in fact would be misleading, (maybe even illegal ??), and not just because of these issues.

Most people would bid the maximum that they can justify. That's like saying that only scalpers take part in auctions (easy counter example : eBay).

[mywittyname]

I mean, go for it. Do you really want to risk getting stuck with a $1100 device that you have to now offload (and pay the associated fees)?

The corollary to this lottery will ensure that people who want Steam Machines day 1 actually get them at cost. So not only does this negatively impact the supply-side of scalping, but it also impacts the demand-side.

[ajmurmann]

That risk is exactly what scalpers have been carrying at everyone of these cases.

[mywittyname]

The difference being the lottery system. When scalpers know they are competing against other scalpers, they know they will corner the market and everyone will pay. Which is how they make money.

With the lottery, a good chunk of those systems are going those who would be willing to pay markup for them, but didn't. So the lottery does double-duty - it kills scalper supply and demand for scalped units.

[mcmoor]

Aaah so scalpers are only as bad as they are because they corner the market. Thanks, I think this is the only reasonable explanation that don't just ignore supply and demand mechanism.

[nehal3m]

Well if you’re prepared to sell a kidney for a flux capacitor and a DeLorean, go for it.

[WhyNotHugo]

They took the same approach for the Steam Deck, so given that this is a repeating MO, anyone wanting to abuse the system had time to prepare accounts.

The payment addresses sound trickier to work around, but abusers can just invent a fake billing address; many payment methods neither receive nor validate this.

[caconym_]

I assume scalpers are often much better at getting through a heavily contested purchase flow (eg the recent steam controller release) due to tools like bots, general experience, and being able to dedicate 20 minutes or more to sitting at a computer constantly refreshing a browser window.

This way it's just a random draw and (I think?) the number of accounts scalpers can enter with is limited because they need to be established. So it might not solve scalping, but it could be a significant improvement.

[elictronic]

DDOS server when not making direct purchase. If there is a financial incentive the process is automated to generate maximum value for the scalper. In our modern age scalpers are not going to be waiting.

Biggest impediment would be changes to purchase process. Run one live user through and repeat for how many bots you want to buy more.

Agreed with your comment on random being better. I just found a scalper sitting at a PC for 20 minutes waiting to buy pretty funny.

[somenameforme]

I expect Steam is already being DDOS'd probably close to 24/7. DDOS services are cheap, and there's plenty of kids with a card that think they're going to show off their 1334 haxing skillz after getting banned for using an aimbot they also paid for.

[Ekaros]

They are not exactly great in handling large peaks of traffic. They don't last that long, but they are still there. Controller launch had order processing issues. Any large sale start always have issues. Though it might be less load and more of making tens of thousands of background changes on items on sale.

[unholiness]

It doesn't solve scalping, it solves putting everyone in a Red Queen race[0] against the scalpers.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race

[nehal3m]

I think account age and activity should be weighted into that equation.

[gs17]

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.

[noxvilleza]

What type of activity? Just purchasing? There's thousands of bot accounts made every day which are active in the sense of playing games, but don't buy very much.

[BlueTemplar]

One issue here is that one, very important for the future of Valve, type of target customer here is first time Steam users : teens without a console nor a (gaming) PC. April 2026 is already going to be a problem for them.

(Though I guess someone in their family can enter the lottery for them.)

[throwaway2037]

Activity I can understand, but how should age be weighted? Do you intend to prefer younger or older players? Should annual income (or taxable income) also be weighted?

[Gooblebrai]

That crosses the line to elitism

[gambiting]

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.

[bluescrn]

Nah, just rewarding loyalty

[nehal3m]

Maybe weighted is the wrong term, it’s a threshold and that seems prudent.