(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
Despite Valve’s efforts to prevent scalpers from taking advantage of the Steam Machine’s limited supply, there are still a few opportunists out there who are taking the risk of selling the pre-order slot that they have won. A quick search for “Steam Machine” on eBay would pull up results for pre-order slots sold at a significant premium above Valve’s own $1,049 retail price.We see various listings for the 512GB version selling between $1,363.70 to $2,800 — a 30% to 167% premium. Scalper prices for the 2TB version are far more egregious, with listings priced between $2,399 and $2,899, making it 93% to 140% more expensive than buying it directly from the Steam Store.Valve has already anticipated this event, especially given the massive interest in the Steam Machine and limited supply. This has happened multiple times before, especially with the arrival of the PlayStation 5 and every Nvidia GPU launch since the 30 series. To avoid frustration among legitimate gamers who couldn’t score a console during the first run of pre-orders but see several listings from third-party sellers with excruciatingly tall markups, Valve set up a randomized reservation system to make buying the Steam Machine as fair as possible.
