Scalpers, right? Doesn't matter whether it's PlayStation 5 consoles or new GPUs, fresh trainers or flippin' Transformers toys - these days, if something's likely to be in demand, a hot item, a 'must-have', a cavalcade of ratbags will snaffle a truckload of them with the express intention of selling them on for vastly inflated sums. If you've experienced the pain of trying to buy a PS5 in 2021, you know what I'm talking about.
Valve's announcement of a new, portable device - the Steam Deck - has inevitably had many potential buyers sighing at the inevitability of it going the way of the PS5. Which is to say: bulk quantities snagged by aftermarket sellers who'll bump its £349 basic-model asking price way up. However, Valve thinks it has a solution that'll prevent that from happening.
Check out the Steam Deck in our video, below...
As PC Gamer reports, anyone attempting to register a heap of new Steam accounts as a way to sell multiple Steam Decks on simply will not be allowed to. Each Steam Deck pre-order will be attached to a Steam account that will need to have made a purchase on the platform from before June 2021. This is, says Valve, a measure necessary to "ensure a fair ordering process".
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The prior-purchase rule will be in place for 48 hours, following Steam Deck pre-orders going live on Friday July 16 at 10am Pacific time (oh, so, today then). Users will also have to put down a five dollar deposit to secure their pre-order, another measure designed at keeping pre-orders connected to accounts. Steam Decks will also only be available on a basis of one per Steam account holder. Here's the pre-order page.
We'll see if this goes a long way to combatting the risk of scalpers getting loads of Steam Decks and then charging over the odds. It certainly seems like a better system than the nothing-at-all that Sony and Xbox put in place for their new-gen console rollouts - but then, these are very different machines aimed at very different audiences.
In Valve-related news, a movie based on the Portal games is currently in production, and as interesting as Steam Deck might look, there's still the distinct possibility of Steam games coming to consoles, too.