The Steam Controller is out—kinda. If you were lucky enough to buy one in the days, hours, or minutes after they were made available, and before Steam crashed, then you’re laughing all the way to the sofa. If not, you’ve likely been staring blankly at the store page for whenever a restock takes place or paying a reseller mad money for one on eBay.
Those resellers have been seen charging two/three times the price of a Steam Controller for the privilege of not waiting around for one. That’s wild. Not only because you could spend less on a much more premium pad that doesn’t have Valve’s logo on it (and admittedly fewer specialised inputs), Valve has also shown it has a better solution for this sorta thing—one that it’s ready to roll out again here. A reservation system.
As Valve says, “while we were happy to see such a high level of interest, the experience for a lot of you trying to buy it was incredibly frustrating.”
“We plan to continue replenishing stock as we get more in, but in the meantime wanted to share changes we’re making to improve the purchase experience and to limit reseller activity: Beginning May 8th at 10 am Pacific, we’re opening a reservation queue for Steam Controller.”
It’s a similar approach to the Steam Deck, which launched during a time of widespread price hikes and ‘economic headwinds’ much like today. Yet it came out of that period relatively unscathed. And while it took over a year for me to receive my own Steam Deck following making a reservation, and I was a little jealous throughout that time, I’d argue the experience was far better than when I was also trying to buy a PS5 in the year following its launch for my partner’s birthday.
- Reservation made: 29/7/21
- Take it easy for a year
- Purchase for delivery: 8/8/22
By comparison, my experience with the PS5 was to sign up to a host of different services that would offer alerts to my phone when a restock would happen for the PS5. One of those even required a paid subscription. I’d then have mere moments to open the link and attempt to checkout. This process went on for weeks, with daily attempts, until finally securing a console in an expensive bundle I didn’t really want or need. I was pleased to get a console, grateful at the time to get the chance, but the entire process sucked.
I’ve similarly reported on the release of new graphics card generations for nearly a decade now. These are also a mad scramble to the checkout and result in similar eBay listings and tales of woe as the Steam Controller has. It’s a little different in that many companies beyond Nvidia, AMD, and Intel actually sell the graphics cards themselves, which means there are multitude ways to buy one on the day, including some ‘loyalty’ programs I’m not happy about—those seem too much like companies holding leverage over customers to do stuff they wouldn’t normally do for a chance to buy something at full price. Yuck.
But the general gist is that the way we do it right now only plays into resellers’ hands and leads to some hard feelings when new stuff comes out.
I’d much rather sit around with a ticket in my hand to someday buy a thing than have to enter the rat race of trying to secure one in a frenzied free-for-all. I don’t want to bash the bots. I don’t want to fight off resellers. I don’t even want to outsmart the system for my own gain. And we know from these experiences, and many like them over the past five years, that it’s not going to get any easier. Web scrapers and agents powered by AI could make securing stock for in-demand products even tougher as these bots become more advanced and tougher to discern from real people.
My hope for the immediate future is that Valve rolls out the same for the Steam Frame and Steam Machine. It probably already planned to—these two are likely to be in similar demand to the Steam Controller but, due to their increased complexity and cost, tougher to stockpile. They’re also arguably more exciting prospects. Though Valve has had a while to build up stocks due to a later release, it also still underestimated the demand for the Controller.
Supply and demand are famously hard to anticipate. Valve recently admitted the same to us but it’s not alone in this. I was told by supply chain expert Dr. Thomas Goldsby that one adage in the business is that when things go well, no one notices the supply chain; when they go poorly, it’s suddenly under the microscope. The global supply chain is very fragile and things can and do change in short periods, as Valve found out between announcing its new hardware and when it hoped to ship it.
A reservation system could help here. Or at least, try to take the mystery of forecasting out of the equation. Make sure to hit the timeline set for delivery, even if that takes a long time, as per the Steam Deck, and, best case scenario, you can push the timeline forward if you’re able. The flipside is if you have to push back the delivery timeline. Don’t forget this did happen with the Steam Deck. It was delayed by two months due to supply chain issues and material shortages.
But in the long-term, it’d be good to see some change to how we approach major tech launches to try to ease some of the stress and disappointment.
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