Steam Machine became a shortage before the release – pre-order reservation is sold at the price of a top PC

There is still time before the official release of the new Steam Machine from Valve, but a full-fledged secondary market has already formed around the device. On eBay, offers to resell not the console itself, but the rights to its pre-order began to appear en masse – and their prices exceed the official ones.

The pre-order reservation became an independent product before the release

Valve has opened the Steam Machine reservation system in advance, hoping to limit the chaotic start of sales and even out demand. However, instead, there was an unexpected side effect: the reservations themselves became the object of speculation.

According to VideoCardz, eBay users are listing such “purchase rights” for between $1,950 and $2,900, depending on the version of the device. That’s roughly double Valve’s official pricing.

In fact, it is not the console that is being sold, but the opportunity that is guaranteed to be received after launch – and it is this scarcity that has become a key driver of price increases.

The gap between the official price and resale reaches 100%

The imbalance is especially noticeable in older configurations. For example, the version of the Steam Machine with a 2 TB drive is resold for $2,700-$2,899, while the official price of a similar configuration is about $1,349-$1,428.

Younger models also did not escape price overheating: the pre-order reservation version of 512 GB is offered for about $1,950, while the official price is about $1,049.

Despite this, some of the lots have already been bought, indicating a steady demand from users who are willing to overpay for early access to the device.

Valve’s attempts to limit resale have not stopped the market

Valve has implemented a number of restrictions to reduce the risk of speculation: linking to Steam accounts with purchase history, a limit of one system per household, and other controls. However, these mechanisms turned out to be insufficient to completely prevent the emergence of a “gray market” in pre-order reservation

A similar situation has already arisen before — after the release of the updated Steam Controller, which also began to be resold at a price 2-3 times higher than the official one. Then Valve tightened individual restrictions on device purchases.

When pre-order reservation is more expensive than PC

The paradox of the situation is that the price of a resold Steam Machine pre-order is comparable, and sometimes exceeds the price of a full-fledged gaming PC. For the same money, you can build a system with top-end RTX 5080 and Ryzen 7 9800X3D components, which will potentially provide higher performance.

In other words, a classic scenario of scarcity has already formed around the Steam Machine at the pre-order stage: the demand begins to live separately from the official market, and the price – separately from the logic of the iron.