If you buy at scalper prices, you will never live it down, deservedly.
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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Hot take. Don't buy scalped products and the market will dry up.
It is against eBay’s TOS to sell an item not physically in possession.
Report every single one of these as a violation
- Presale listings must guarantee that the item will be shipped within 40 business days of purchase
- The date the item will be available to ship must be clearly stated in the listing
When’s valve shipping them? Have they even given an eta yet?
Valve stated that they will be sending out confirmation mails to the people in the order they made it onto the randomized reservation list as units become available. You could be extremely lucky and get your confirmation tomorrow or you could get it sometime within the year. Pretty sure that's the timeframe Valve listed and they don't seem to tell you where you made it onto the list. They also don't give you anything a seller could list as definitive proof, so the scalpers might not even have made it onto the list lol.
Well they better hope there is no delays with manufacturing, like a ram or sad shortage. It says the item must ship in 40 days.
I spent 10min trying to find where I could report a listing and couldn't.
eBay doesn't give a shit. Just saw someone sell some cool shit then instantly cancel on the winner to immediately repost the sale with a $.01 start and a shitty note about their reserve now as the first text in their description.
I can put my next turd up for 10k preorder on ebay. Doesn't mean anyone is actually buying it. Unlike the shitstain that is tomshardware I actually checked and I count 4 sold units in my region, all for around 2000€ and around 25 on the US site for between $1500 and $2500. Funnily enough, some of the listings seem to be just a screenshot of the preorder form for around the same price as the actual unit. The rest of them include some form of email screenshot as "proof", which means nothing since they are barely personalised and don't include any actual ID or information that could be verified with Valve. I'm not losing my mind over those numbers, but it's still hilarious how stupid some potential buyers are.
🙄 anyone paying $3000 is just a rube with too much money, lol.
It looks like a nice machine, don't get me wrong, but you can do better elsewhere if willing to spend that much $$$.
Even as grim as things are getting there's still a lot of people with far more money than they deserve.
Let's be honest, you can do better for less than that. That price hike is specifically because of brand recognition, puny production and the stupid tax.
Not by much less. I'd say you'd need at least $800 to be sure to run most games at at least 1080p60. I've been playing with pcpp lately, using Belmont's Curse as an upcoming game with fairly tame recommended specs (10th gen Intel and a 3060), and I couldn't really come in under $800 after case, reliable PSU, etc were all factored in. Maybe if you went for specifically used/secondhand parts but I limited my choices to just new or manufacturer refurbished since used inventory will vary widely in availability and price from area to area.
Of course, the minimum requirements are like an 8th gen Intel and a 1650. So you can probably hit 1080p60 with a lot less than the recommended.
I'm curious how low we could go, requiring all parts be new or manufacturer refurbished. I tried for $500 but couldn't get anywhere close.
I was referring to the $3k price tag. Though seeing the downvotes, I dare say you're not the first to somehow miss that I was talking about the article title, and not the MSRP.
Ahhh, okay. Yeah 3 grand would get you a beast. Or, you know, like a car or something.
I think people willing to pay that much are idiots that don't deserve the money they have, though. Somehow I don't think that's a mom or dad wanting to get a Nintendo for their kids or whatever.
This why we cant have nice things...
You can have nice things though. Even if you didn't get one in the lottery you can buy an equivalent machine for a similar price.
Seriously, people complain about high prices and evil companies, but we do it to ourselves by being unable to resist these bad deals
Nearly $3000 on a Steam Machine, constant price increases from Netflix with tightening restrictions too, etc
Well, only a small percentage of the population needs to be unable to resist bad deals for scalpers to find value.
I dont have any of these things but can you rrally blame someone just trying to have fun?
If a little bit of patience means we can all have fun then yes we can.
If you had $3000 to spend on a PC why the fuck would you spend it on a Steam Machine? You could have bought a way better machine and saved $1000.
I dont get that part but i het the demand. People really want to escape from this corporate hellhole and valve being one of the least shittiest tech companies it makes sense why the demand is so high. I dont get why you would pay 3k to get a chance to get a console with the performance of a 800€ machine.
Like AC in Europe 😓
Honestly, I think what this tells me is that Valve's system is working, and not a lot of scalpers have reservations.
If there were more competing scalpers, or if some guy had 200 of them he needed to move, they'd be less ambitious than triple the already very high price.
That makes sense. Even if I bought something for myself, there's still going to be a price for which I'm willing to part with it. It costs nothing to list on eBay, so why not?
At least these scalpers have one good effect for Valve: They make the Steam Machines original price by Valve look like a bargain.
I hope they just end up sitting on their steam machines with no one buying. 1k is already steep, in no world would I pay 3k for this type of hardware
There really aren't that many listings on eBay for it. I think Valve largely handled the pre-order system with wisdom. Verified accounts with previous purchases, no more than 1 per household, and a raffle for the literal pre-order slot.
What's telling is how many are actually sold, which by my count is 11. That's pretty damn low.
You know valve should just over price these machines on first sale then drop the price after the scalper grab everything, offer 1 coupon per account for for buyers with the value of the coupon being the diffrence in price on the before and after, but only one per buying account. That way valve can raid scalpers bank accounts and keep they're customers happy.
Dumb people will buy anything.
These computers are underpowered and overpriced.
Are these the prices on completed transactions, or are they just idiots making a listing with that price?
I mean everyone that wanted one gets a fair shake at it in the randomized queue. I suppose I'm just hoping and speculating that Valve can detect and remove mass preorders from scalper bots.