Steam Hardware@sopuli.xyzbyFubarberry@sopuli.xyz
15 hours

Some speculation on the Steam Controller and scalpers

English

Disclaimer: This was mostly for my own curiosity, and the estimates are probably flawed in one way or another.

I was wondering how much of the Steam Controller sales went to scalpers. Lots of websites have reported on scalpers reselling the controller, but most of those articles just focus on how much is being asked for the controller, not how many are actually available/being sold. That doesn’t really tell us much by itself.

Looking at ebay’s sold items, there’s about ~240* listed Steam Controllers that have been sold since the announcement.

There’s an additional 20 current listing I see for the new Steam controller, that haven’t sold yet (weirdly, almost all the unsold listing are located in Australia, with only a single remaining listing for a US seller).

Next question is how many Steam Controllers were available to buy. Approximate estimate for the US was around 35,000-40,000 controllers*. Europe would have it’s own supply.

So while there were scalpers, it doesn’t seem like they were responsible for a meaningful percentage of the sales.

Additional notes: Valve limited controller sales to 2 per transaction, but didn’t limit it to 2 per account. This is speculated to have been a mistake, but still would have limited how many scalpers could have gotten with how hard it was to complete a transaction.

*Math section:

5 pages of results for steam controllers in the ebay sold section, at 60 items per page, so a max of 300 sold. However, none of those pages are just the 2026 Steam Controller, a lot are actually the classic steam controller, hori steam controller, steam link, or other controllers that advertise that they’re for steam. I didn’t do an exact count for all 5 pages, but only 48 out of 60 results on page 4 were the steam controller 2026, so around ~240 units.

The number of controllers sold in the US is based on the shipment of controllers Valve received. It was 28,500 lbs/12,970 kg. The controller and puck weigh 308g, which would divide out to something like 42,000 controllers in the shipment. After adding in additional packaging, 35,000-40,000 is a more likely estimate. The shipment officially contained 40 packages, so possibly 1000 controllers per package.

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    • truxnell@aussie.zone
      2 hours

      It’s still available to buy direct in AU (it did go OOS but I just checked and it’s available). So hopefully that means the AU scalpers won’t get much traction

    • LiveLM@lemmy.zipEnglish
      10 hours

      Valve limited controller sales to 2 per transaction, but didn’t limit it to 2 per account. This is speculated to have been a mistake

      Huh, wouldn’t expect them to mess this up, especially after their experience shipping the Deck.

      • G0ldenSp00n@lemmy.jacaranda.club
        8 hours

        They failed to charge tax in some states because they had it set as a piece of software. So clearly they are still learning, lol

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      14 hours

      Hah, I actually yesterday ran the same math as you just did, for total # of controllers, and yeah, we got the same result.

      ~42,000 if you don’t take excess packaging weight into account, yeah, probably between 35k and 40k if you do.

      Now, you’re the only person (or outlet, for that matter) I’ve seen even try to do the actual math on scalp counts so uh… yeah, seems reasonable to me.

      Yeah, I was telling people, like… half a year ago, that Steam sells direct to consumer, not via a retail store, so, that inherently cuts down on scalping, because they can indeed impose their own hard limits on buys per customer… barring the existence of basically a bunch of scalper fake steam accounts, which… doesn’t appear to be the case, otherwise yeah, you’d expect a larger proportion of scalper listings on secondary marketfronts.

      Now I haven’t followed things close enough to see the stuff about ‘2 per txn’ vs ‘2 per Steam Account’, but I mean, what you say there also seems plausible.

      tl:dr Good work, passes my smell test!

      • agentTeiko@piefed.socialEnglish
        11 hours

        Also note that the number of sold can be inflated because people are buying and selling to sock puppets to juice the price.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          10 hours

          True, though this would be even more difficult to reliably measure/estimate.

          Whats the term, uh, wash trading, basically, for scalpers?

          Inflate volume surreptitiously, makes the market look more substantial, more liquid than it actually is.

          Also allows for price manipulation.

    • Stupendous@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13 hours

      That’s interesting. That’s not actually a huge volume of resellers and buyers on eBay. I’m guessing one more shipment of controllers like the last and up for sale on steam and that’ll kill the above msrp resale price

    • SoloCritical@lemmy.world
      13 hours

      Am I fucking crazy or is 35000 controllers like a shockingly low amount of controllers??? There’s like 300+ million ppl in the states and I imagine there’s probably more than 35k people in my state alone that want one… what is actually up with that small number??

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
        13 hours

        I think it’s important to remember that the last steam controller did not do well financially. It’s very likely that this is a first run to test the waters a bit with actual orders before ordering 2 million controllers where 90% end up in warehouses.

        Also we know that they’ve been struggling with manufacturing and everything overseas is completely fucked right now. Could be that the wanted to get something out the door now vs indefinitely waiting longer.

        • SoloCritical@lemmy.world
          2 hours

          Yeah true enough, it’s just super frustrating being one of the people that wanted one to see it sell out almost instantly… THEN to see scalpers selling it for $250 smfh. I can’t wait for another batch to drop.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        13 hours

        Valve doesn’t have the scale.

        They’re nowhere near as big of a company as Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony.

        FFS they have like under 500 total employees, roughly 350.

        For many legal purposes in the US, they are literally a small business.

        They retooled the place that was making Steam Decks… into being the place that makes Steam Controllers.

        Because that would be more affordable than renting out and kitting out an entirely new production facility somewhere near Shenzen or whatever.

        They’re not big enough to get first dibs, preferential contract bulk pricing, from component manufacturers.

        In the ocean they’re swimming in?

        They’re bass or salmon, compared to dolphins, sharks, orcas, whales.

        I made a joke about this being an ‘artisinal, small batch’ controller in another thread, but it basically isn’t a joke, if you understand the scales involved.

      • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        12 hours

        How many people do you think really want a steam controller? It costs more than an xbox or ps5 factory controller. TMR isn’t unique to the steam controller, the ps4/5 controllers have a trackpad for basic navigating the desktop on a couch, and you can only use it with steam games. (GN review) For any normal person there’s very little reason to get it over the myriad of other great controllers out there.

        Valve themselves even said they’re targeting a niche.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          10 hours

          Part of it is just a genuine gamble.

          You can try to model demand for a kind of thing that has never specifically existed before.

          You will probably fuck that up at first.

          Early signs point to -> they significantly underestimated demand.

          By how much exactly… shrug?

          Also, there’s basically no way you can find no difference between the trackpads on the Steam Controller, and the trackpad on the PS controllers, unless you’ve never used a Steam Deck or the Steam Input system.

          Does a PS 4/5 allow you to fully remap all the controls of a game to literally whatever you want?

          Add in macros, turbos, input chords, make a joycon be a mouse, make a trackpad be a joycon, or open and navigate a custom ingame menu you made up, or be a new button pad?

          Make motion controls activate under whatever conditions you specify, and map that motion to whatever input you want?

          • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            10 hours

            there’s basically no way you can find no difference between the trackpads on the Steam Controller, and the trackpad on the PS controllers

            Never said there’s no difference, just that it’s good enough to navigate the desktop on a couch.

            Does a PS 4/5 allow you to fully remap all the controls of a game to literally whatever you want?

            Not natively, but they’re a normal directinput device so there’s plenty of software out there to do it. Plus steam input for steam games.