How to combat scalpers

[DonFerrari]

ZyroXZ2 said:

DonFerrari said:

Isn't Deck a lot less volume and demand than the 2 consoles? Is it even being reported to suffer massive sold out?

It is, it's constantly sold out and WAYYY behind on meeting demand, but this thread was about combatting scalpers, and the Steam Deck CLEARLY has enough demand to have a scalping problem... except it doesn't.

I mean, look at limited editions for popular franchises, those also face major bot scalping problems.  Valve handled the Steam Deck fairly, even if, again, massively being undersold because of it.

Shatts said:

That's what I said for my first option (using accounts to order one). But like some people say, Steam Deck only works because the demand is significantly less and the targeted audience are niche. Do people really want to wait those long queues. That's why I said prioritize the people in their subscription service or any method that can determine that person really wants it for their own good. Retailers are still important imo so fully online is not really the first choice.

That's the thing, it's a long queue, but there's virtually no "omg bots scalpers bought them all we can't get one!" thing happening because they have stipulations in place.  Valve is properly getting Steam Decks into buyer's hands because they've set up restrictions in place, and though once again the lack of distribution and production struggles to meet demand, the reality is that the demand is high enough that there SHOULD be a scalping problem.  Except there (mostly) isn't...

PS5 have sold more than 20M units and I could bet there was not more than 1M scalped units, so it isn't as big problem as we may think. If there was so much issue with scalpers as we are led to believe the sales of SW would have been much lower than it is. I haven't seem any sign of lowered SW sales due to HW being hoarded.

But please explain to me how the system Valve is doing makes it undersold if there are lines to buy it and sold out problems? You can't sell what you don't have, so even if Valve changed the system with no more system available no more sales would be made, also Valve haven't said how much they sold.