[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.

[somenameforme]

Wait, you bought a time machine? The wonders that must await us!

[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

[Xirdus]

They wouldn't, because they wouldn't know how much to bid. People pay more on eBay because they see how much more they need to pay. The whole point of a Vickery auction is to eliminate this feedback. A tiny fraction of megawhales will overbid by an order of magnitude because they want the gadget at literally any cost - but the vast majority of people would underbid, specifically because scalpers haven't started selling it yet for inflated prices. The act of putting it on eBay itself increases how much people are willing to pay for it. The big winners would be scalpers, who, being both the professional appraisers and the market makers, are in the best position to bid well and are nearly guaranteed to resell at a higher price.

[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).

[Xirdus]

If people were perfectly rational robots, this could work. Also, sales jobs wouldn't exist and politicians would be held accountable for their promises.

In real world, sales tactics work. People can be influenced to pay more than they thought they're willing to pay. Scalpers know this and exploit this at scale. A Vickery auction gives basically zero opportunity to get talked up. People will bid at the "thought they're willing" price, and scalpers will outbid them. Then the same people who underbid on auction will go to eBay, see it listed at "influenced to pay more" price, and buy it for much more than they bid.

And yes; the vast majority of eBay auction bidders are indeed scalpers, whose day job is to look for cheap deals that they can resell for more. It's extremely rare in this day and age to actually take advantage of eBay bidding to buy in-demand stuff on the cheap. It's much easier when there's "buy now" option but you need to be fast and lucky because you're competing against scalpers here too. Of course things are different for stuff that few people want in the first place - scalpers are not interested in those because they're too hard to offload, so you get your fair chance.

[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.