Steam Machine launches today
store.steampowered.com1842 points by theschwa a day ago
1842 points by theschwa a day ago
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine
https://www.lttlabs.com/articles/2026/06/22/the-newell-nucle...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66QzlDewigE
> Why a randomized reservation order?
[...] we wanted to create a system that would be less frustrating and more fair for everyone. A launch that starts at a specific day and time tends to reward bots, people with fast internet connections, talented gaming fingers for quick F5/refresh reactions, and those who can schedule their life around that moment. By accepting reservation signups over the course of a few days, without any incentive to be first, we're hoping to take away some of that friction. This is nice. Yeah, this is a promising solution to scalping. Previously, if you had only small numbers of consoles available at launch, scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them. With Valve's new policy, that share is reduced to s/g, where s is the number of verified Steam accounts controlled by scalpers and g is the number of legit gamer accounts. Since s is likely to be much less than g, s/g is close to zero, and scalping is dramatically curtailed. Almost all of the initial batch of consoles will go to legit gamers. I've never understood why anti-scalpers just don't work backwards from shipping address. Are these scalpers all really keeping hundreds of actual physical addresses they can receive packages at? Like if you see the limited product has 100 orders going to the same building, or apartment, or whatever then flag it before it goes out. Limit PO Boxes, etc. Sure they can find mules to buy+receive one and then sell to the scalper, but the more steps you put in the better. Same for the people scamming Sam's club by buying memberships, ordering limited items, then refunding the membership. Just lock orders to members older then >1yr and make sure it only ships to the actual physical address attached to the membership. Flag multiple memberships at the same address. I've run a modest shipping op and the second I saw even a couple orders of the same product going to the same address I would halt it and do additional verification. I really wanted a PS5 when it was first released, and I refused to pay the scalper tax to get one, so I spent a few minutes a few times a day over a couple of weeks trying to snag one from one of the many retailers selling them. Extraordinarily frustrating, I was not so interested in this process that I was going to script it or any such nonsense, I just wanted to eventually get lucky and snag one. I eventually did, and when it finally arrived at my doorman building I mentioned what was in the package to the doorman, and how happy I was to finally get my hands on it after the effort expended and he said "oh really? there's a guy on the 5th floor who's bought dozens of them - he sold me one at cost". At the scale of the PS5 release (I don't know how many they first shipped in 2020, but they're at >80M sold now so undoubtedly X million in the first year) - would an address match intervention have been able to differentiate my order from the dozens of orders the scalper on the 5th floor had placed, presuming some cooperation from the doorman to allow for variance in the details of the shipping address the scalper used? I'm reasonably confident the answer is no and I would have been caught in the net that attempted to prevent the scalper from scalping. 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? You slip the doorman $50 to hold tracking numbers of packages you're having sent to random units in the building. Or just promise him a unit at MSRP for his help. These sorts of things are pretty cheaply routed around for those making scalping into a volume business. Sure you can probably lock things down so you catch the vast majority of these mechanisms, but not without impacting legitimate users. So it's a tradeoff of how much more of a hassle do you want to make things for legitimate customers vs. how much you want to lock out resellers. You don't even really need a doorman in many buildings either. There will be a shared mail room (if you're lucky) where packages get dropped. If you work from home you just watch the UPS/Fedex tracking and run down the moment it gets delivered to snag it before anyone else sees it. The few folks I know who did this sort of thing were less professionals making a living off it, and more someone who wanted to subsidize their gaming habit by grabbing 3 or 4 units and keeping one while flipping the rest. They'd just ship to friends/family. The folks buying 50 units at a time are pretty rare from what I can tell. I have since moved out of NYC but yes I had an apartment number. If the doorman was helping this scalper, the scalper could have varied the address he used enough to avoid exact match dedupes while still ensuring he could claim the packages as his from the doorman. Doorman? Do you live in Trump Tower? Doorman buildings are quite common in NYC. [edit: to be clear they are not the norm, they are more expensive than buildings without one, but there are still lots of them that are not Trump Tower or other places for the absurdly wealthy] It’s less about 1 scalper buying 100. Order limits, credit card limits, etc already restrict that. It’s more about 1000 scalpers buying two or three to immediately resell. There are entire discords and communities around this with thousands of members. 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. They do: > Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries. The answer is that once you move past a modest shipping op the people with actual visibility on that would be the warehouse that's fulfilling, also typically people who don't have the power to cancel orders themselves. Ecomm orders want to drop to the distribution center as soon as possible, which means you can't wait until you have a whole bunch of them just so you can analyze which addresses are on multiple orders. You would either need to 1) detect this in the warehouse systems (I spent my career working on these, so I can say with high certainty that is almost definitely Not going to happen, especially if they go through a 3PL) OR 2) you have to cancel orders after they have already dropped to the warehouse (which means wasted labor in the best-case scenario). None of that is worth the effort to a company who is fundamentally still getting paid the same for the product regardless of if the purchaser is a scalper or not. 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) You are vastly over-estimating the tech power the vast majority of businesses have dedicated to logistics. There's a large number of different systems involved with a enterprise logistics stack. Ecomm store provider, ERPs, middleware, warehouse systems, shipping systems, banking, etc. Which part of the pipeline are you going to hold up while you wait for enough orders to pool to build a meaningful heuristic? The solution Valve came up with is quite brilliant. It sounds like you are massively overthinking it. When you pre-order anything, you need to enter a shipping address. Why would you need to consider anything beyond that or require 'dedicated' logistics? that's not to say I don't like Valve's solution - I agree, it is very nice I don't think they're necessarily overestimating what they've dedicated to logistics, they're overestimating what they've dedicated to anti-scalping. If they cared to detect it, they could invest even just a token effort and make great strides. But why would they care? IIUC: scalping manuals and scalper ring Discord accesses are sold as get rich quick schemes underground. Gullible individuals join the big supply choking sessions. Many of them don't make much but masterminds don't care. So it really has to be done like Cybertruck early deliveries to 100% prevent scalping and flipping(the fact that Musk nails it...) nobody wants the Cybertruck, why would anyone scalp it? Early deliveries of the cybertruck were highly anticipated and the cybertruck is still the best selling electric truck even after needing to compete with the F150 lightning, Hummer EV, silverado EV, and Rivian R1T What? ... they pay low income people $2-5, literally, to be the face of their scalping. It's like gig work for those people. The worker uses their own name, address, and credit card even to make the purchase. The scalper reimburses them + $5. Low-income people have their own credit card? I'm having trouble picturing the situation where someone willing to accept gig work for a few $ can have a credit card that allows a 4-figure spend. That seems like a very bad deal for the bank to me. many ways to write the same address. abbreviations, fake unit/apt numbers, apt numbers, etc. try to verify that at the scale of nike or adidas. ultimately they are selling out inventory so it probably takes a lot of convincing to spend money on a cat and mouse game In the US USPS provides this as a service. Every time I put my address in I get asked to use the standardized version. It is the AddressesV3 service. We're planning on using it (for the website redesign) to make sure that the addresses are correct (enough). There's a significant number of people who register and quit/get fired, yet still have to make one final filing (for a state government agency) that we snail-mail them a final "I'm done with this" paper form to fill out. And every couple of years an envelope gets returned as "undeliverable". For bulk shippers the USPS will penalize you if you have... well it was not bad addresses but non-standard addresses. The mail order company I worked for a few years ago put more effort than I expected to normalize and verify addresses met USPS standards. So I guess the penalty made it worth it. Yeah so does Australia Post. I've dug too deeply but Google Maps on face value seems to provide it as well. 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. 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. The downside is this service is not up-to-the-minute accurate. I rented a new-construction house and it was the better part of a year before it made it into the USPS address correction database, despite receiving mail just fine. Might be acceptable collateral damage, but it’d exclude some people. I think offering suggested edit is ok but requiring the edit be accepted is unwise. Unfortunately I've had websites strip out the house number in the "cleaned up" address. 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. From what i remember during the great GPU Crisis of 2022, the scalpers were shipping them to randomized addresses and intercepting them before the actual owner scooped them up. Capitalism really does create a perverse incentive here, and when there's significant margin at play, there's an opportunity. 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. Knowing how it works is simple. You can game it with different names, you can modify the text of the address. My address I was able to make 20+ versions without trying. You can add unit # to a house address. It becomes wack-a-mole at some point. I feel like to put that much effort into anti-scalping efforts you actually have to have a product that's really valuable. For a lot of products this really isn't the case (like this Steam machine iteration). > I've never understood why anti-scalpers just don't work backwards from shipping address. If Alice and Bob live in the same apartment and try to buy Steam Machines, but Bob forgets to include his apartment number (everything gets dumped on a shared package room, after all), Alice will be confused when an automated email accuses her of fraud. 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. Totally doable - I remember talking with a guy that worked at a sports betting company and they flagged any accounts with any duplicated fields as requiring further investigation (to clamp down on gaming bonus bets and deposit matches). You see only the address when it is already paid and to be shipped. Cancelling credit card transaction is very costly to the merchant. I'm pretty sure I have to provide my address to many e-commerce shops during checkout, so that happens before payment. so i think you're a bit off. it's s/g but g is legit accounts who want to buy the steam machine. we could say it's 5000 scalper accounts, and 50000000 gamer accounts. but it's not 5000/50000000, it's like 4500/20000. which isn't bad! but scalpers will still be way over-represented, because they'll be trying to buy it when most steam accounts won't. now one fuzz factor is the queue system, as you're not putting down money to get in line i expect a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise sign up will, in case they decide to buy one when given the chance. so we might have 40000 gamer sign ups, but only 50% will pull the trigger. this also gives scalpers an out should the resale not be worth it. (obviously all numbers made up) Isn't it s/(s+g), where as you correctly say, g is legit account who want to buy? 1000 people want to buy a machine, 10 of them are scalpers, that's one percent on average? s = 10 and g = 990. I feel like I'm having a slow day XD 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. Scalpers can be damned because Valce might just deprioritize accounts in lottery unless they already spent money on Steam and play games. 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. They said the extra time ment they would be able to do additional verification. I’ll bet checking what games you purchased and play time are a part of that. 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. This is also possible because they are only selling through their website, while other consoles go through retailers.
I'd actually prefer a retailer just for doing this over one that was first come first serve. When the Xbox 360 came out decades ago, the store I got mine from did this. They had like 10 consoles and there were like 200 people there. They did a raffle for the consoles and I got to buy one. It felt like I won the Xbox even though I still had to pay for it. I never thought much of the need for trigger warnings until I read “the Xbox 360 came out decades ago” The XBox 360 release is closer to the (US) release of the NES than it is to the current day. Dang. That wasn't supposed to be a challenge... That will have eventually become true no matter what tbh. Similarly, Windows XP's release is closer to the release of the IBM 5150 (the first-ever IBM PC) than it is to today. But the difference in computing power is more impressive between the first IBM PC in 1981 and a new PC from 2001, than between a new PC from 2001 and now. At least subjectively (it might be that software in general got more slower than hardware got faster). we're dead, practically. The original Crysis will be TWENTY YEARS OLD in 2027. 30th anniversary of Quake's release today. That one for me is particularly painful. We were playing the alpha release before the game officially came out after work. I still work at the same place, though I've moved jobs within it a few times. Casual reminder we're all mortal! :D DX I don't fear dying in a car accident. I dread the certainty that one day I'll be 80 and all I'll have left are memories, everything and everyone I ever loved will be gone (unless I have children which is very unlikely at this point), the world will be completely alien to me, and there's absolutely nothing I can do to prevent this - apart from dying even sooner which is even worse. I think there are ways most people cope with this knowledge most of the time so they don't go crazy. I get why so many elites are obsessed with preventing aging. 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? I think the Xbox 360 online stuff was only shut down... two or three years ago? It hung around for a long time. They have the Master Chief collection or something (almost all the games in one with a selector screen), I remember a year or two ago booting into and playing online game, plus there appears to be a discord server that organizes players to better reach playable numbers. It’s effectively closed off to new accounts too, which significantly reduces the effectiveness of bot campaigns Fusion Festival (happening this week), aka European Burning Man (but not exactly) does this. And the soccer WC went the opposite direction, by encouraging scalping, giving it an official avenue, and taking a cut of the profits. Now only rich people get to enjoy a sport meant for the masses, yay. > 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) Not true at all. In many of the big football/soccer countries there's always been very strong measures to ensure affordability. England caps premier league prices, the Bundesliga goes further still by having a 50 + 1 rule, that is all teams are majority member owned. Up until ~2000 they had no private investors at all. The yardstick in European football has always been that an ordinary working person can go and see a game in the stadium. A fair amount of sports did until they got the privatization treatment. 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. I think the actual solution is closer to, you buy a team specific ticket/option: if your team advances you get the ticket, if some other team advances their fans get the tickets. 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. FIFA is corrupt, so this shouldn't be a surprise. To be fair, if FIFA wanted to maximize profits, they should auction tickets off instead of allowing scalpers to eat the delta between sales price and real value. To be fair, GP said that FIFA is corrupt, not that FIFA is either profit-maximizing nor out to light the goose that lays the golden egg on fire. I know it's hard to imagine in the US, what with our quarterly-profit-maximizing corruption, but it is possible to be corrupt and still have to balance long-term concerns like "keep the graft flowing". The trick to getting away with being corrupt is to as corrupt as you can without your marks/customers/voters/whatever revolting¹. Switching ticket sales to an auction format would likely add enough friction that many people² wouldn't bother, bringing the price back down, or would make a very public noise about how unfair it feels. -------- [1] or authorities taking action, but that usually comes after the marks/customers/voters/whatever speaking up loud enough, unless by “taking action” you mean “taking a piece of the action” by way of being corruptible themselves. [2] from those who do, or might in future, play along with the current race-to-buy-at-fixed-teered-rates system. > 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. Perhaps if you could find economics professsors that agree with each other, I would. Not everything must be race to the bottom. Not everything should be a fucking market. If only rich snobs and people with poor financial control can afford your tickets, that will be the type of fan you’ll retain. Ironically it’s the thing that will destroy many sports. People worldwide watch the premier league for the atmosphere. That comes from working class people singing and following their team. There’s a reason Newcastle fans out-sing the home crowd at Old Trafford every year, even when we’re losing. Same thing applies to live music. If I pay high prices for your tickets and for travel to see you play in one of your limited selection of touring cities, sure, I might go. But if you tour again a few years later, I would rather see an artist I haven’t seen live yet. Meanwhile if the tickets are affordable, I’ll try and go again. You’ll have my renewed interest every time. If you pay ten times the price for a ticket and go one fifth as much, they win. Tennis is terrible to watch these days. It was always a bit of a corporate jolly, but the stands are literally half empty for all but the finals of slams. Nobody really cares for the game... > If you'd bought them for $10, you'd instantly turn around and sell them for a few thousand to someone else. I expect there are plenty of people who would in fact, not do that. At many income levels and budgets, gaining $1k from selling a ticket helps a lot less than losing $1k from buying a ticket hurts. Plus many people aren't rational economic actors and would keep the $10 ticket and enjoy the show even if it doesn't make economic sense. Do you realize you also need to pay for hotels and flights and food and etc? In such situations of course you'd sell them. People talk as if the ticket is even the problem and that it's cheap to go otherwise. Many ticket platforms have a resale feature and you get back what you paid if someone gets your ticket. > Do you realize you also need to pay for hotels and flights and food and etc? In such situations of course you'd sell them. Sure, but there's also the situation of all the people who are locals who don't need hotels and flights and food and etc. You assume a big assumption: that everything has to be run by efficient markets. The existence of scalpers is the proof That it is run like an efficient market, not that it has to be. Yes if the ticket selling happened in another world with another species other than humans it is possible that nobody would try to scalp. Here on earth people will find ways to bring non-market prices in-line with a market. It has nothing to do with who is selling the original tickets and all to do with how individual people behave with money.
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