At least I don't think scalper's will be a problem with the Steam Machine and I honestly believe someone with the knowledge of building PCs can build something way more powerful.

Surely you have an apartment number? Or is it like in many places in Europe, where the address is the building number and name of the recipient?

Doorman? Do you live in Trump Tower?

I think there's less motivation to scalp the steam machine than there was e.g. the steam deck or the PS5. With the PS5 there were all those PS5-exclusives where you can either get a PS5 or not play them. The Steam deck was the first of the current wave of practical PC handhelds and it was a while before there were realistic competitors.

The Steam Machine is ultimately a mid-range gaming PC in a nicer form factor and a slight discount compared to building it yourself. I don't think anyone would pay 1.5x for a Steam Machine when they could just buy a regular PC for less. There's no capabilities the Steam Machine has that a regular PC doesn't, which limits the ability of scalpers to charge larger margins and thereby limits the motivation.

As for potentially impacting the wider PC hardware market? Well, retail scalpers are small fry compared to Altman, Bezos, Musk et al.

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)

In the US USPS provides this as a service. Every time I put my address in I get asked to use the standardized version.

I’ve seen websites say during checkout “your address wasn’t in our db but this one was” showing what was clearly a cleaned up form (changed “Circle” to Cir, uppercased, turned ZIP into ZIP+4) so there are ways.

You would have to tell the user “use the corrected/matched one only” though. Some sites offer the correction but don’t make you use it.

I worked for a while at a service company that helped for a few of those issues specifically. It basically served as a back-search against an email address and known connections (social media), and online connections to give it an effective score if it should be manually verified or sidelines into a separate bucket than the general pool.

And even that isn't as icky as a short project I worked on for a major CC company. Still get the icks thinking about it, and I didn't continue beyond the 6mo contract.

Yep this is the right answer, address jigging is the oldest trick in botting. Nowadays with fingerprint browser, generated credit card number and residential proxy, it is very hard to tell legit buyers from scalpers.

nobody wants the Cybertruck, why would anyone scalp it?

What?

I played the NewEgg shuffle game for months to get the couple GPUs I needed during that time... not fun at all. I had to limit myself to bundles where the other component wasn't complete garbage. I still have a 600W EVGA PSU from one of the bundles (RTX-3080) that I've only used once to test if my issue was the PSU, MB or something else... turned out to be the RAM.

I believe that's exactly what the Steam Machine reservation does: limits to one per household, so I take that to mean the address without the name.

Although I think the language in the response dialog will be nicer than accusing of fraud.

I'm pretty sure I have to provide my address to many e-commerce shops during checkout, so that happens before payment.

Yes, you are technically correct (the best kind), but when s is much smaller than g, then s/(s + g) and s/g are approximately equal.

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.

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.

I wonder whether most scalpers are hustle types, bored teenager or organized groups.

Which is pretty much what they did :

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

I never thought much of the need for trigger warnings until I read “the Xbox 360 came out decades ago”

Just a few days ago I was thinking about firing up my 360 to play some Halo Reach. Any idea if the online matchmaking still works?

Had that at a national electronics chain in romania for the PS5 launch.

> Now only rich people get to enjoy a sport meant for the masses, yay.

By and large, the masses have always experienced football on a TV screen. (though removing lower price tickets from such public sport events is still bad)

Well, there is a genuine problem with the WC that reselling solves. It's unclear till a few days before what team will be in which match. That said, I'd prefer the solution where tickets don't go on sale till it's clear which teams are in the match.

Actually, rich people and not so rich people who don't mind borrowing more than they can afford. I'm not rich by any means and there are much worse of than me dumping a couple months salary for the "experience". Not that there is a problem with it if that's what you enjoy. A bit over the top for my taste though.

A stadium full of rich fans makes for a boring event typically.

FIFA is corrupt, so this shouldn't be a surprise.

They can keep it and society will be better off.

> Now only rich people get to enjoy a sport meant for the masses, yay.

I'm so tired of people trying to pretend that limited tickets to an event billions of people want to attend ought to be available to poor people just because. If they sold for a penny, the resale market would eat them up and they'd still cost what they cost. If you'd bought them for $10, you'd instantly turn around and sell them for a few thousand to someone else.

I'm sorry no one prepared you for the fact that rare things have value, but perhaps some introductory economics classes, instead of TikTok-trite-internet-rage would be helpful.

Right. I've been to Fusion Festival. I'm surprised someone called it Burning Man. It's nothing like Burning Man - but I think it has similar counter-cultural vibes. I've not been to Burning Man though. Apparently Fusion is actually the bigger event of the two.

I'd call it an electronic music festival (or a giant rave, because terms like "EDM festival" were invented by corporations to displace "rave" the same way "open source" was meant to sanitize "free software" and Fusion is not a corporate event). I wouldn't call it a psytrance festival - that's just what they play on one stage of many, and maybe the 3rd or 4th biggest. There's a stage run by people from Berghain that plays techno the whole time (my favorite), a drum-n-bass stage, a couple more electronic music stages that I'm not sure about the subgenre, some smaller stages where live rock and metal bands play, theater performances, some kind of car racing thing next to a circus-looking tent, neither of which I've visited. And what the heck is "the hotel"?

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

That crosses the line to elitism

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.)

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.

Concert/game tickets are in a extremely different situation. SM doesn't become completely worthless past a certain (near, known) date.

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.

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.

It wouldn't be hard, but who would pay scalper prices for something that they then have to run dodgy software on that may or may not jeopardize their entire steam account?

This is a different threat model than anti-cheat. Here you just want it to be annoying enough to stop scalping.

So presumably if you make an account which didn't buy a Steam Machine unable to log in on one, you kill the scalping market. It doesn't have to be perfect to make it unpalatable for scalping. Is a scalper going to take the risk on buying a ton of hardware which they can't offload at a profit without also getting users to hack the thing to get it to work and risk a Steam ban?

> 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.

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.

by basically any measure, a market with scalping is worse for everybody involved than one with scalping

Scalpers benefit customers who are willing to pay the market price but missed out on the lottery and otherwise wouldn't be able to buy at all.

Scalping also damages the demand for the product, since it creates a submarket that is volatile and unpredictable.

Basically the opposite. If there are scalpers, there is a predictable price that I can pay. If there aren't, I have to be lucky or have connections.

Which is why scalpers are bad people.

They are not.

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.

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.

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.

Save some shade for people who are buying from the scalpers too.

On a scale of zero to Elon Musk, consumers all have approximately equal amounts of money /s

I think I'd be OK with the idea of a 'First Print' edition that sold for 4-5x the markup, shipped a month earlier, and maybe came with better limited time decorative plate options. They'd only sell 1 to 2% of them total.

Everyone else could get into the second round raffle for a chance to buy / place in line.

What you said is correct, but only for a rational person. Note the wording of your parent comment: "it looks like".

Many if not most people will buy the thing for $X, then complain that someone else scored the same item for $X - $100.

High volume on low margin is an extremely good way to make money. It's very naive to think the easy way to get rich is to price gouge. It's actually often the worst.

They are around because they control most of live venues and major bands don't care enough to fight. There are many ways to play steam games that don't involve buying nearly standard PC hardware at a premium.

I do have my US pixel setup with a local esim for calls/data and a US tello esim that "wifi calls" on my US number over the data from the local esim. It's been working pretty seamlessly and means that, like, my US login.gov two factor tokens still get to my number.

Also, my office here is absolutely covered in maps of just New Zealand, which always gives me a chuckle.

I'm in the rural South Island, which doesn't help either. No Costco for me.

Indonesian here, electronics are everywhere yeah, especially Chinese-made. But the law leans a lot on protectionism, if you try importing one you'll be subject to 10% tax on customs and "other fees".

If you try to import a phone, you'll also have to pay additional fees to "activate" the IMEI, otherwise you won't be able to connect to local cellular providers.

you had the right spirit and a hackers mindset. so dont fret too much on others opinions of you

Again, convenience is something that people value. Most people do not understand gaming PC builds. Even many gamers. They don’t want to. They want to play games, not build computers. A lot of people don’t want to get something from Amazon from some fly by night company that is going to need a few hours to configure, and might not run games they thought it would.

Convenience and being an early adopter are hardly at odds with each other. If anything, these people are early adopters because they want the convenience of not dealing with pc builds. People that already have gaming PCs and love that hobby aren’t going to line up to buy something that they enjoy making, or that they know enough about to feel comfortable buying used from Craigslist.

People are paying for a sure thing. Used PCs and no name Amazon machines are not a sure thing.

You and I might see it differently as people fluent with computers. Reseating a ram stick that got jostled in shipping isnt scary to most people on this site. It is terrifying to most of the world though. Steam is going after people that want to use PC games, but not play hardware tech.

I'm just (occasionally) vocal - i.e. overall a minority. Pretty sure there's way, way, _way_ more people that just quietly do this. I'd even say that the current market makes you appreciate such companies even more.

p.s. a bit of a windows fanboy as well - used to do drivers for it, kind of like the internals / driver model / etc... but I really dislike the path they've taken, and there's nothing else like it.

Finally, I have an old projector setup with an x360/x1x on it right now (hc4000 + diy frame w/ dark energy abyss + 758 v3 + lsr305 + some subs - rag-tag), so I have a good excuse as well :P

A DIY machine can be repaired or upgraded down the line with off the shelf components. The Steam Machine uses proprietary hardware with most components soldered on.

It will be difficult to build it that small, however you will end up with a PC that doesn’t use proprietary hardware and is easier to repair. There is something to say about that.

But it's not an additional Steam Machine, it's a potential additional Steam Machine. In expectation, I'm sure it's more like 1/1000th of a Steam Machine.

I'll be intrigued to see if this is true. The experience of the Steam Controller may not translate to the Steam Machine. The Steam Controller is a unique controller. The Steam Frame is a unique VR headset. Obviously not the only thing in their space, but at least a unique combination of features that may make it more valuable than other things in the space.

But the Steam Machine is really just a PC with a couple of neat features. If you are willing to overpay a scalper for a Steam Machine, it seems much more reasonable to suggest that maybe you should just take that same amount of money and buy a machine where that money translates into power rather than scalper profit. After it became clear that the Steam Machine was going to be hit hard by the price increases, I just bought a machine that was pure AMD. Where it is living I don't care if it's a little cube or not, nor do I care about the LED bar, and the integrated puck wasn't a big deal when I just use the current one as a charger too. For just a bit more money than the Steam Machine it's about 50% more powerful on all relevant fronts, and I may upgrade to a 9070XT (current latest-gen AMD card) which isn't an option on the Steam Machine. And since I bought that machine the same machine is now nearly $100 more expensive itself.

Paying a scalper for the controller at least makes some sense. Perhaps the same for the Steam Frame. But of the three things Valve is releasing this year, I'm not sure it makes sense to pay a scalper an extra 50% for a Steam Machine. In that scenario, you're not really paying that extra for the machine as a whole; you're paying extra for those "couple of neat features" alone, the form factor, the integrated controller puck, the LED on the front, whatever else is specifically about the Steam Machine and not a true statement about any machine with SteamOS or Bazzite installed. You need to want one of those things really, really badly to overpay that much. The value proposition is quite different.

Of course, this is a very analytical take on what may be a primary-emotional decision for some people. We'll see.

How are people going to get a Steam account with a purchase from before April 27th though?

I guess you could find somebody online and buy their account, but surely this would be a slow and unreliable process.

How do they get around restriction on only one entry per address? Open 1000 PO boxes?

Ok but organizing a separate address for each delivery is going to be a pain

The Dutch auction vs lottery are two ways to solve scalping. They differ in what one considers fair.

market doing what the market does.

It seems to me like a social score system is a direct upgrade to this in certain ways: participating in undesired behaviour will cause you headaches you cannot really solve with money. Too bad it "naturally" slips into mass surveillance, but restricting privileges would be a great alternative to reducing the ability to take care of necessities for you and yours.

It doesn't have to only be money. In person waiting time is another mechanism to allocate a scarce resource. Back in the day when # of tickets exceeded demand at a fixed price, the tickets went to he/she who was willing to arrive early and wait in line longer (ie, die hard fans). Camping out for tickets was a thing and I somewhat miss it relative to scalpers and price being the only mechanism to drive demand/supply to equilibrium.

greed isn't even the worst. greed is a necessity if you have any competition. sometimes it's hard to tell greed from operational efficicency.

rent seeking however... rent seeking should be taxed to hell and back.

The MNT Station, currently in development, could very well be a fully-OSHW "Steam Machine": https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt-research/mnt-station

Doesn't solve any problems that are causing the price crunches. The problem is largely RAM and NAND pricing, which no small shop is going to spin up a fab to create. Making your own SoC would do little to alleviate the price issues.

Yeah hat would be awesome. Some RISC-V processor or something like that. A man can dream :)

That's the thing, you care about celebrities, others about reality. If US didn't stop Korean companies from selling old manufacturing equipment to China, we'd still have RAM available, but Chinese one, so obviously every capitalist would rather blame individuals instead of the US government.

But thats my perspective, which obviously I feel like is closer to the truth on the ground, wouldn't claim it's some universal truth though.