Yeah, this is a promising solution to scalping. Previously, if you had only small numbers of consoles available at launch, scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them. With Valve's new policy, that share is reduced to s/g, where s is the number of verified Steam accounts controlled by scalpers and g is the number of legit gamer accounts. Since s is likely to be much less than g, s/g is close to zero, and scalping is dramatically curtailed. Almost all of the initial batch of consoles will go to legit gamers.
I've never understood why anti-scalpers just don't work backwards from shipping address. Are these scalpers all really keeping hundreds of actual physical addresses they can receive packages at? Like if you see the limited product has 100 orders going to the same building, or apartment, or whatever then flag it before it goes out. Limit PO Boxes, etc.
Sure they can find mules to buy+receive one and then sell to the scalper, but the more steps you put in the better. Same for the people scamming Sam's club by buying memberships, ordering limited items, then refunding the membership. Just lock orders to members older then >1yr and make sure it only ships to the actual physical address attached to the membership. Flag multiple memberships at the same address.
I've run a modest shipping op and the second I saw even a couple orders of the same product going to the same address I would halt it and do additional verification.
I really wanted a PS5 when it was first released, and I refused to pay the scalper tax to get one, so I spent a few minutes a few times a day over a couple of weeks trying to snag one from one of the many retailers selling them. Extraordinarily frustrating, I was not so interested in this process that I was going to script it or any such nonsense, I just wanted to eventually get lucky and snag one.
I eventually did, and when it finally arrived at my doorman building I mentioned what was in the package to the doorman, and how happy I was to finally get my hands on it after the effort expended and he said "oh really? there's a guy on the 5th floor who's bought dozens of them - he sold me one at cost".
At the scale of the PS5 release (I don't know how many they first shipped in 2020, but they're at >80M sold now so undoubtedly X million in the first year) - would an address match intervention have been able to differentiate my order from the dozens of orders the scalper on the 5th floor had placed, presuming some cooperation from the doorman to allow for variance in the details of the shipping address the scalper used? I'm reasonably confident the answer is no and I would have been caught in the net that attempted to prevent the scalper from scalping.
At least I don't think scalper's will be a problem with the Steam Machine and I honestly believe someone with the knowledge of building PCs can build something way more powerful.
Surely you have an apartment number? Or is it like in many places in Europe, where the address is the building number and name of the recipient?
You slip the doorman $50 to hold tracking numbers of packages you're having sent to random units in the building. Or just promise him a unit at MSRP for his help.
These sorts of things are pretty cheaply routed around for those making scalping into a volume business.
Sure you can probably lock things down so you catch the vast majority of these mechanisms, but not without impacting legitimate users. So it's a tradeoff of how much more of a hassle do you want to make things for legitimate customers vs. how much you want to lock out resellers.
You don't even really need a doorman in many buildings either. There will be a shared mail room (if you're lucky) where packages get dropped. If you work from home you just watch the UPS/Fedex tracking and run down the moment it gets delivered to snag it before anyone else sees it.
The few folks I know who did this sort of thing were less professionals making a living off it, and more someone who wanted to subsidize their gaming habit by grabbing 3 or 4 units and keeping one while flipping the rest. They'd just ship to friends/family. The folks buying 50 units at a time are pretty rare from what I can tell.
I have since moved out of NYC but yes I had an apartment number. If the doorman was helping this scalper, the scalper could have varied the address he used enough to avoid exact match dedupes while still ensuring he could claim the packages as his from the doorman.
Doorman? Do you live in Trump Tower?
Doorman buildings are quite common in NYC.
[edit: to be clear they are not the norm, they are more expensive than buildings without one, but there are still lots of them that are not Trump Tower or other places for the absurdly wealthy]
It’s less about 1 scalper buying 100. Order limits, credit card limits, etc already restrict that.
It’s more about 1000 scalpers buying two or three to immediately resell. There are entire discords and communities around this with thousands of members.
I think there's less motivation to scalp the steam machine than there was e.g. the steam deck or the PS5. With the PS5 there were all those PS5-exclusives where you can either get a PS5 or not play them. The Steam deck was the first of the current wave of practical PC handhelds and it was a while before there were realistic competitors.
The Steam Machine is ultimately a mid-range gaming PC in a nicer form factor and a slight discount compared to building it yourself. I don't think anyone would pay 1.5x for a Steam Machine when they could just buy a regular PC for less. There's no capabilities the Steam Machine has that a regular PC doesn't, which limits the ability of scalpers to charge larger margins and thereby limits the motivation.
As for potentially impacting the wider PC hardware market? Well, retail scalpers are small fry compared to Altman, Bezos, Musk et al.
They do:
> Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.
The answer is that once you move past a modest shipping op the people with actual visibility on that would be the warehouse that's fulfilling, also typically people who don't have the power to cancel orders themselves.
Ecomm orders want to drop to the distribution center as soon as possible, which means you can't wait until you have a whole bunch of them just so you can analyze which addresses are on multiple orders. You would either need to 1) detect this in the warehouse systems (I spent my career working on these, so I can say with high certainty that is almost definitely Not going to happen, especially if they go through a 3PL) OR 2) you have to cancel orders after they have already dropped to the warehouse (which means wasted labor in the best-case scenario).
None of that is worth the effort to a company who is fundamentally still getting paid the same for the product regardless of if the purchaser is a scalper or not.
Why would any people need to see the addresses at all? The solution being proposed is something that you'd automate with a series of heuristics. And your point about the company making the same money for shipping to scalpers vs non scalpers seems like it would only apply to the shipping company, but if you view from the perspective of the product company, obviously they have an incentive to avoid scalpers because it negatively impacts the brand and the price spikes are money not captured by the product company and may even reduce further spending (eg if a buyer spaffed half their budget on an overpriced console, that's less for buying games which benefit the product company, eg Steam in this case)
You are vastly over-estimating the tech power the vast majority of businesses have dedicated to logistics. There's a large number of different systems involved with a enterprise logistics stack. Ecomm store provider, ERPs, middleware, warehouse systems, shipping systems, banking, etc. Which part of the pipeline are you going to hold up while you wait for enough orders to pool to build a meaningful heuristic?
The solution Valve came up with is quite brilliant.
It sounds like you are massively overthinking it. When you pre-order anything, you need to enter a shipping address. Why would you need to consider anything beyond that or require 'dedicated' logistics?
that's not to say I don't like Valve's solution - I agree, it is very nice
I don't think they're necessarily overestimating what they've dedicated to logistics, they're overestimating what they've dedicated to anti-scalping. If they cared to detect it, they could invest even just a token effort and make great strides. But why would they care?
[dead]
IIUC: scalping manuals and scalper ring Discord accesses are sold as get rich quick schemes underground. Gullible individuals join the big supply choking sessions. Many of them don't make much but masterminds don't care.
So it really has to be done like Cybertruck early deliveries to 100% prevent scalping and flipping(the fact that Musk nails it...)
nobody wants the Cybertruck, why would anyone scalp it?
Early deliveries of the cybertruck were highly anticipated and the cybertruck is still the best selling electric truck even after needing to compete with the F150 lightning, Hummer EV, silverado EV, and Rivian R1T
What?
... they pay low income people $2-5, literally, to be the face of their scalping. It's like gig work for those people. The worker uses their own name, address, and credit card even to make the purchase. The scalper reimburses them + $5.
Low-income people have their own credit card? I'm having trouble picturing the situation where someone willing to accept gig work for a few $ can have a credit card that allows a 4-figure spend. That seems like a very bad deal for the bank to me.
many ways to write the same address. abbreviations, fake unit/apt numbers, apt numbers, etc. try to verify that at the scale of nike or adidas.
ultimately they are selling out inventory so it probably takes a lot of convincing to spend money on a cat and mouse game
In the US USPS provides this as a service. Every time I put my address in I get asked to use the standardized version.
It is the AddressesV3 service. We're planning on using it (for the website redesign) to make sure that the addresses are correct (enough). There's a significant number of people who register and quit/get fired, yet still have to make one final filing (for a state government agency) that we snail-mail them a final "I'm done with this" paper form to fill out. And every couple of years an envelope gets returned as "undeliverable".
https://developers.usps.com/addressesv3
For bulk shippers the USPS will penalize you if you have... well it was not bad addresses but non-standard addresses. The mail order company I worked for a few years ago put more effort than I expected to normalize and verify addresses met USPS standards. So I guess the penalty made it worth it.
Yeah so does Australia Post. I've dug too deeply but Google Maps on face value seems to provide it as well.
I’ve seen websites say during checkout “your address wasn’t in our db but this one was” showing what was clearly a cleaned up form (changed “Circle” to Cir, uppercased, turned ZIP into ZIP+4) so there are ways.
You would have to tell the user “use the corrected/matched one only” though. Some sites offer the correction but don’t make you use it.
The downside is this service is not up-to-the-minute accurate. I rented a new-construction house and it was the better part of a year before it made it into the USPS address correction database, despite receiving mail just fine.
Might be acceptable collateral damage, but it’d exclude some people.
I think offering suggested edit is ok but requiring the edit be accepted is unwise.
Unfortunately I've had websites strip out the house number in the "cleaned up" address.
I worked for a while at a service company that helped for a few of those issues specifically. It basically served as a back-search against an email address and known connections (social media), and online connections to give it an effective score if it should be manually verified or sidelines into a separate bucket than the general pool.
And even that isn't as icky as a short project I worked on for a major CC company. Still get the icks thinking about it, and I didn't continue beyond the 6mo contract.
Yep this is the right answer, address jigging is the oldest trick in botting. Nowadays with fingerprint browser, generated credit card number and residential proxy, it is very hard to tell legit buyers from scalpers.
Knowing how it works is simple. You can game it with different names, you can modify the text of the address. My address I was able to make 20+ versions without trying. You can add unit # to a house address. It becomes wack-a-mole at some point.
From what i remember during the great GPU Crisis of 2022, the scalpers were shipping them to randomized addresses and intercepting them before the actual owner scooped them up.
Capitalism really does create a perverse incentive here, and when there's significant margin at play, there's an opportunity.
I played the NewEgg shuffle game for months to get the couple GPUs I needed during that time... not fun at all. I had to limit myself to bundles where the other component wasn't complete garbage. I still have a 600W EVGA PSU from one of the bundles (RTX-3080) that I've only used once to test if my issue was the PSU, MB or something else... turned out to be the RAM.
I feel like to put that much effort into anti-scalping efforts you actually have to have a product that's really valuable. For a lot of products this really isn't the case (like this Steam machine iteration).
> I've never understood why anti-scalpers just don't work backwards from shipping address.
If Alice and Bob live in the same apartment and try to buy Steam Machines, but Bob forgets to include his apartment number (everything gets dumped on a shared package room, after all), Alice will be confused when an automated email accuses her of fraud.
I believe that's exactly what the Steam Machine reservation does: limits to one per household, so I take that to mean the address without the name.
Although I think the language in the response dialog will be nicer than accusing of fraud.
Totally doable - I remember talking with a guy that worked at a sports betting company and they flagged any accounts with any duplicated fields as requiring further investigation (to clamp down on gaming bonus bets and deposit matches).
You see only the address when it is already paid and to be shipped. Cancelling credit card transaction is very costly to the merchant.
I'm pretty sure I have to provide my address to many e-commerce shops during checkout, so that happens before payment.
so i think you're a bit off. it's s/g but g is legit accounts who want to buy the steam machine.
we could say it's 5000 scalper accounts, and 50000000 gamer accounts. but it's not 5000/50000000, it's like 4500/20000. which isn't bad! but scalpers will still be way over-represented, because they'll be trying to buy it when most steam accounts won't.
now one fuzz factor is the queue system, as you're not putting down money to get in line i expect a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise sign up will, in case they decide to buy one when given the chance. so we might have 40000 gamer sign ups, but only 50% will pull the trigger. this also gives scalpers an out should the resale not be worth it.
(obviously all numbers made up)
The lower g is, the lower the profit margin for s is, so so the fewer resources they will put into it. Unless there's unlikely to be more releases later or g are not cost sensitive and want it at a premium, this neatly scales to lower numbers.
Isn't it s/(s+g), where as you correctly say, g is legit account who want to buy? 1000 people want to buy a machine, 10 of them are scalpers, that's one percent on average? s = 10 and g = 990.
I feel like I'm having a slow day XD
Yes, you are technically correct (the best kind), but when s is much smaller than g, then s/(s + g) and s/g are approximately equal.
Scalpers can be damned because Valce might just deprioritize accounts in lottery unless they already spent money on Steam and play games.
I am sure that Valve has some analytics they can lean on to try and measure how likely it is for an account to be a scalper/trading bot and it's also quite convenient for them that if they're describing their system as random they can sneak in some biases to help steer towards real accounts without making it easy for scalpers to glean what specific attributes they're weighting.
Yeah, I hope there's a gradient between scalper buying a single 99 cent game and actual person who has time played on multiple games and multiple purchases. The probability of someone with say a 3000 hours played across multiple games with hundreds or thousands of dollars of purchases is far less likely to be a scalper than someone with a single purchase many years ago and maybe some completely f2p play in say dota/cs, since the latter is likely to be a bot account.
They said the extra time ment they would be able to do additional verification. I’ll bet checking what games you purchased and play time are a part of that.
I wonder whether most scalpers are hustle types, bored teenager or organized groups.
Which is pretty much what they did :
> You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.
This is also possible because they are only selling through their website, while other consoles go through retailers. I'd actually prefer a retailer just for doing this over one that was first come first serve.
When the Xbox 360 came out decades ago, the store I got mine from did this. They had like 10 consoles and there were like 200 people there. They did a raffle for the consoles and I got to buy one. It felt like I won the Xbox even though I still had to pay for it.
I never thought much of the need for trigger warnings until I read “the Xbox 360 came out decades ago”
The XBox 360 release is closer to the (US) release of the NES than it is to the current day.
Reading this was physically painful.
Dang. That wasn't supposed to be a challenge... That will have eventually become true no matter what tbh.
Similarly, Windows XP's release is closer to the release of the IBM 5150 (the first-ever IBM PC) than it is to today.
But the difference in computing power is more impressive between the first IBM PC in 1981 and a new PC from 2001, than between a new PC from 2001 and now. At least subjectively (it might be that software in general got more slower than hardware got faster).
we're dead, practically.
red rings of death, specifically :)
Time to wrap us in a towel and put us in the oven!
The original Crysis will be TWENTY YEARS OLD in 2027.
And I still can't afford a GPU to play it
Don’t worry, you also can’t afford RAM to play it either. Not that it needs much.
30th anniversary of Quake's release today.
That one for me is particularly painful. We were playing the alpha release before the game officially came out after work. I still work at the same place, though I've moved jobs within it a few times.
Casual reminder we're all mortal! :D
DX
I don't fear dying in a car accident. I dread the certainty that one day I'll be 80 and all I'll have left are memories, everything and everyone I ever loved will be gone (unless I have children which is very unlikely at this point), the world will be completely alien to me, and there's absolutely nothing I can do to prevent this - apart from dying even sooner which is even worse.
I think there are ways most people cope with this knowledge most of the time so they don't go crazy. I get why so many elites are obsessed with preventing aging.
Become closer to people younger than you and not everyone you know will be dead when you're old.
Just a few days ago I was thinking about firing up my 360 to play some Halo Reach. Any idea if the online matchmaking still works?
I think the Xbox 360 online stuff was only shut down... two or three years ago? It hung around for a long time.
They have the Master Chief collection or something (almost all the games in one with a selector screen), I remember a year or two ago booting into and playing online game, plus there appears to be a discord server that organizes players to better reach playable numbers.
It doesn't.
Had that at a national electronics chain in romania for the PS5 launch.
It’s effectively closed off to new accounts too, which significantly reduces the effectiveness of bot campaigns
Fusion Festival (happening this week), aka European Burning Man (but not exactly) does this.
And the soccer WC went the opposite direction, by encouraging scalping, giving it an official avenue, and taking a cut of the profits. Now only rich people get to enjoy a sport meant for the masses, yay.
> Now only rich people get to enjoy a sport meant for the masses, yay.
By and large, the masses have always experienced football on a TV screen. (though removing lower price tickets from such public sport events is still bad)
Not true at all. In many of the big football/soccer countries there's always been very strong measures to ensure affordability. England caps premier league prices, the Bundesliga goes further still by having a 50 + 1 rule, that is all teams are majority member owned. Up until ~2000 they had no private investors at all.
The yardstick in European football has always been that an ordinary working person can go and see a game in the stadium. A fair amount of sports did until they got the privatization treatment.
Well, there is a genuine problem with the WC that reselling solves. It's unclear till a few days before what team will be in which match. That said, I'd prefer the solution where tickets don't go on sale till it's clear which teams are in the match.
I think the actual solution is closer to, you buy a team specific ticket/option: if your team advances you get the ticket, if some other team advances their fans get the tickets.
Actually, rich people and not so rich people who don't mind borrowing more than they can afford. I'm not rich by any means and there are much worse of than me dumping a couple months salary for the "experience". Not that there is a problem with it if that's what you enjoy. A bit over the top for my taste though.
A stadium full of rich fans makes for a boring event typically.
FIFA is corrupt, so this shouldn't be a surprise.
To be fair, if FIFA wanted to maximize profits, they should auction tickets off instead of allowing scalpers to eat the delta between sales price and real value.
To be fair, GP said that FIFA is corrupt, not that FIFA is either profit-maximizing nor out to light the goose that lays the golden egg on fire.
I know it's hard to imagine in the US, what with our quarterly-profit-maximizing corruption, but it is possible to be corrupt and still have to balance long-term concerns like "keep the graft flowing".
The trick to getting away with being corrupt is to as corrupt as you can without your marks/customers/voters/whatever revolting¹. Switching ticket sales to an auction format would likely add enough friction that many people² wouldn't bother, bringing the price back down, or would make a very public noise about how unfair it feels.
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[1] or authorities taking action, but that usually comes after the marks/customers/voters/whatever speaking up loud enough, unless by “taking action” you mean “taking a piece of the action” by way of being corruptible themselves.
[2] from those who do, or might in future, play along with the current race-to-buy-at-fixed-teered-rates system.
To be fair, most of the scalpers are FIFA.
They can keep it and society will be better off.
> Now only rich people get to enjoy a sport meant for the masses, yay.
I'm so tired of people trying to pretend that limited tickets to an event billions of people want to attend ought to be available to poor people just because. If they sold for a penny, the resale market would eat them up and they'd still cost what they cost. If you'd bought them for $10, you'd instantly turn around and sell them for a few thousand to someone else.
I'm sorry no one prepared you for the fact that rare things have value, but perhaps some introductory economics classes, instead of TikTok-trite-internet-rage would be helpful.
Perhaps if you could find economics professsors that agree with each other, I would.
Not everything must be race to the bottom. Not everything should be a fucking market.
If only rich snobs and people with poor financial control can afford your tickets, that will be the type of fan you’ll retain.
Ironically it’s the thing that will destroy many sports. People worldwide watch the premier league for the atmosphere. That comes from working class people singing and following their team. There’s a reason Newcastle fans out-sing the home crowd at Old Trafford every year, even when we’re losing.
Same thing applies to live music.
If I pay high prices for your tickets and for travel to see you play in one of your limited selection of touring cities, sure, I might go. But if you tour again a few years later, I would rather see an artist I haven’t seen live yet.
Meanwhile if the tickets are affordable, I’ll try and go again. You’ll have my renewed interest every time.
If you pay ten times the price for a ticket and go one fifth as much, they win.
Tennis is terrible to watch these days. It was always a bit of a corporate jolly, but the stands are literally half empty for all but the finals of slams. Nobody really cares for the game...
> If you'd bought them for $10, you'd instantly turn around and sell them for a few thousand to someone else.
I expect there are plenty of people who would in fact, not do that.
At many income levels and budgets, gaining $1k from selling a ticket helps a lot less than losing $1k from buying a ticket hurts.
Plus many people aren't rational economic actors and would keep the $10 ticket and enjoy the show even if it doesn't make economic sense.
Do you realize you also need to pay for hotels and flights and food and etc? In such situations of course you'd sell them. People talk as if the ticket is even the problem and that it's cheap to go otherwise.
Many ticket platforms have a resale feature and you get back what you paid if someone gets your ticket.
> Do you realize you also need to pay for hotels and flights and food and etc? In such situations of course you'd sell them.
Sure, but there's also the situation of all the people who are locals who don't need hotels and flights and food and etc.
You assume a big assumption: that everything has to be run by efficient markets.
The existence of scalpers is the proof
That it is run like an efficient market, not that it has to be.
Yes if the ticket selling happened in another world with another species other than humans it is possible that nobody would try to scalp. Here on earth people will find ways to bring non-market prices in-line with a market. It has nothing to do with who is selling the original tickets and all to do with how individual people behave with money.
I think the point is that there are many ways to perfectly stop scalpers and keep non-market prices. You don’t HAVE to give in to market pressures.
For example, you could make tickets non-transferable, but refundable.
I’m going to straight up call this a classist view to hold. Things like sports events, music events became popular BECAUSE of the working classes watching and taking part. Football, the biggest single sport on Earth would be nothing were it not for the millions of working class people playing it, filling stadiums, following their teams through thick and thin around the world and stretching their budgets to do so.
And you think it’s ok for rich people to swoop in, appropriate the attire and vibe of the sport and working class people just need to suck it up because they’re poor? The people who made the sport what it is now can’t enjoy it? The people who STILL make the sport what it is?
Disgusting.
This, but for everything: industrial modernity, pizza, jazz, and in general nearly all music and culture of note (it's true that some high culture is actually good, though it oftentimes is a thin rebadge of something working people had already been doing for a long time): working people have done almost literally everything that matters throughout the entirety of history. Rich people should be grateful we don't turn them into (delicious) sausage and leave it at that.
> Rich people should be grateful we don't turn them into (delicious) sausage and leave it at that.
You and I both know, the poor will not do a damn thing.
History always repeats in cycles. The poor never do a damn thing, until it gets pretty bad and then they vote for fascists, and if they are starving then the guillotines come out for whoever is currently powerful (fascists or not). That's how it has always worked. As long as the powerful class continues providing bread and circuses, no guillotines. In cycles where fascism happens, it does accelerate the cycle because fascists are too stupid to realize they need to provide bread and circuses.
This and plenty of other problems that plague the society now and over the past centuries could be solved by eliminating the distinction and gap between "rich" and "poor".
Why should poor people be allowed to enjoy things?
You want to see a significant fraction of society sad and angry?
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or sarcastic…
Yes.
nonsense, the lowest strata of working society has never had it so good, unfortunately things are still going to be out of reach, perhaps what the comment above said was a little harsh but there is truth to it, if what you love about the sport is merely its accessibility then find or start a new one (that the rich will appropriate in a couple of hundred years).
How do you measure good?
Mate poor people never went to any world cup. I find it funny to watch rich guys discuss why it is too expensive to buy a ticket TO THE WORLD CUP. Like that was never a thing people afforded unless you happen to have the luck of your life and live next to one of the stadiums. Most people go to zero ticketed cultural or sports events per year where I'm from, and that's at the country level before you even slice by poor people.
It's like watching millionaires discussing that nowadays poor people can't afford to go on a rocket to space.
I know this particular context was within the WC but the phrasing of the parent comment seemed to go beyond just that and to football tickets in general, which is what set me off.
Also, I know for a fact that plenty of working class people from England go to the World Cup. Fair enough, they’re wealthy by the standards of Brazilian favelas but that’s a broader issue. It still stings to see the price gouging that FIFA is enjoying this time round.
I really don't think you're interpreting that right. The idea of football tickets in general becoming too expensive for the working class doesn't even make sense, there's so many of those tickets.
Depending on the club, you can’t compare pricing for Blyth Spartans tickets to Arsenal (famously expensive) and say “well you can just go follow a different club.” That’s just not how football support works in England.
Also, I pointed to another comment that working class fans are the fans that make the game. Man U are famously followed by “the prawn sandwich brigade” and the top tier clubs are regularly mocked by others for being out-sung at their own stadiums.
> I know this particular context was within the WC but the phrasing of the parent comment seemed to go beyond just that and to football tickets in general, which is what set me off.
No idea why you would read a comment in a thread specifically about the WC and think, "but boy, think how angry I could be if I decided this comment was about something else entirely?!"
Wouldn't it be better if they could go at least once or twice though? If they wanted to?
Sure, it would be better that everyone could have a beautiful life without any worries and being able to do all they want to. Choosing the world cup as the thing to be mad about is ridiculous though.
Is it possible to be mad about two or more things?
> aka European Burning Man
Fusion festival is a Psytrance festival. It's nothing like Burning Man (a DIY community driven festival).
For the American's it would be closer to Electric Forest or Lost Lands (but with good music).
Right. I've been to Fusion Festival. I'm surprised someone called it Burning Man. It's nothing like Burning Man - but I think it has similar counter-cultural vibes. I've not been to Burning Man though. Apparently Fusion is actually the bigger event of the two.
I'd call it an electronic music festival (or a giant rave, because terms like "EDM festival" were invented by corporations to displace "rave" the same way "open source" was meant to sanitize "free software" and Fusion is not a corporate event). I wouldn't call it a psytrance festival - that's just what they play on one stage of many, and maybe the 3rd or 4th biggest. There's a stage run by people from Berghain that plays techno the whole time (my favorite), a drum-n-bass stage, a couple more electronic music stages that I'm not sure about the subgenre, some smaller stages where live rock and metal bands play, theater performances, some kind of car racing thing next to a circus-looking tent, neither of which I've visited. And what the heck is "the hotel"?
Burning Man is unique in that it's a bottom up festival. Where it's the attendees that build the stages and festival. Vs a normal festival where it's the organizers who do the stages and programming. There are local "burns" in Europe but they're very small.
I only know Fusion festival from the psytrance community so I didn't realize it was a multi genre festival, but that makes sense!
Does it solve scalping? It seems like there is still money in sighing up with the goal to resell. Granted this is better in that I don't have to race the scalpers.
Till the sales price matches the market value scalping will exist. The best way to address that is a vickery auction. Till then scalping will continue.
"Customers must meet the following criteria to be able to sign up:
That prevents flooding of tickets by a single person but doesn't prevent me from signing up even though I just want to resell
And why should that matter? If Valve wants to sell below market this is a reasonably fair system for doing so. What you do with your purchase is none of their concern.
You can fight scalpers by hardware limiting the device to the account that was used to purchase for some set time (2 years or so)
Sure but no one can do anything about your free will. This is about being fair, any ideas to make the system fairer?
Scalping exists because the sales price is significantly lower than the market value. Just do a Vickery auction and scalping is gone. Because it's avickery auction the price likely wouldn't be totally ludicrous either. If there is a batch of 10,000 units sold the price would be the 10,001th highest bid.
You've proposed that N times already.
Brands could do that - or an approximation of that by having an higher launch prize for the initial batch - yet they mostly don't.
Maybe the intent here is not keeping difference to themselves, and there's more brand value in not profiting from supply constraints, while being perceived as doing something about mass scalping.
Since most brands don't seem to agree with you, and if you just feel like you should be able to use your extra money to get lucky, you can still try to convince one of the lucky ones. I guess the few who might take it to eBay will charge even more for the privilege.
Not everything needs to be about efficient markets.
Yes, there likely is a large component where the median customer would be unhappy, just like they were with Uber surge pricing despite it being a win for the median participant in any role. That's why I'm here to preach the gospel of the unfathomable beauty and efficiency of the market and capitalism that has catapulted us into the greatest time in history.
Wait, you bought a time machine? The wonders that must await us!
In Valve’s, they’re raffling the opportunity to make a purchase. For a generalized Vickery auction, it’s assumed the buyer will complete the bid, but that’s not so in valve’s case. What’s a good solution when there is a significant % of bids that do not complete the purchase?
You pre-authorize the charge.
If the price is not totally ludicrous then the scalpers outbid pretty much everyone else. If you know MSRP, then normal people bid MSRP whereas scalpers take a million dollar loan and bid all 10,000 units at double MSRP, then sell at triple/quadruple MSRP. If you don't know MSRP, then most people won't know how much to bid, and won't bid at all, leaving just scalpers.
Scalpers bid high because they know they can get when more. The people who pay more to scalpers on an auction side like eBay would just bid that directly to Valve
They wouldn't, because they wouldn't know how much to bid. People pay more on eBay because they see how much more they need to pay. The whole point of a Vickery auction is to eliminate this feedback. A tiny fraction of megawhales will overbid by an order of magnitude because they want the gadget at literally any cost - but the vast majority of people would underbid, specifically because scalpers haven't started selling it yet for inflated prices. The act of putting it on eBay itself increases how much people are willing to pay for it. The big winners would be scalpers, who, being both the professional appraisers and the market makers, are in the best position to bid well and are nearly guaranteed to resell at a higher price.
> If you know MSRP
Giving a list price would make no sense in the case of an auction, in fact would be misleading, (maybe even illegal ??), and not just because of these issues.
Most people would bid the maximum that they can justify. That's like saying that only scalpers take part in auctions (easy counter example : eBay).
If people were perfectly rational robots, this could work. Also, sales jobs wouldn't exist and politicians would be held accountable for their promises.
In real world, sales tactics work. People can be influenced to pay more than they thought they're willing to pay. Scalpers know this and exploit this at scale. A Vickery auction gives basically zero opportunity to get talked up. People will bid at the "thought they're willing" price, and scalpers will outbid them. Then the same people who underbid on auction will go to eBay, see it listed at "influenced to pay more" price, and buy it for much more than they bid.
And yes; the vast majority of eBay auction bidders are indeed scalpers, whose day job is to look for cheap deals that they can resell for more. It's extremely rare in this day and age to actually take advantage of eBay bidding to buy in-demand stuff on the cheap. It's much easier when there's "buy now" option but you need to be fast and lucky because you're competing against scalpers here too. Of course things are different for stuff that few people want in the first place - scalpers are not interested in those because they're too hard to offload, so you get your fair chance.
I mean, go for it. Do you really want to risk getting stuck with a $1100 device that you have to now offload (and pay the associated fees)?
The corollary to this lottery will ensure that people who want Steam Machines day 1 actually get them at cost. So not only does this negatively impact the supply-side of scalping, but it also impacts the demand-side.
That risk is exactly what scalpers have been carrying at everyone of these cases.
The difference being the lottery system. When scalpers know they are competing against other scalpers, they know they will corner the market and everyone will pay. Which is how they make money.
With the lottery, a good chunk of those systems are going those who would be willing to pay markup for them, but didn't. So the lottery does double-duty - it kills scalper supply and demand for scalped units.
Aaah so scalpers are only as bad as they are because they corner the market. Thanks, I think this is the only reasonable explanation that don't just ignore supply and demand mechanism.
Well if you’re prepared to sell a kidney for a flux capacitor and a DeLorean, go for it.
They took the same approach for the Steam Deck, so given that this is a repeating MO, anyone wanting to abuse the system had time to prepare accounts.
The payment addresses sound trickier to work around, but abusers can just invent a fake billing address; many payment methods neither receive nor validate this.
I assume scalpers are often much better at getting through a heavily contested purchase flow (eg the recent steam controller release) due to tools like bots, general experience, and being able to dedicate 20 minutes or more to sitting at a computer constantly refreshing a browser window.
This way it's just a random draw and (I think?) the number of accounts scalpers can enter with is limited because they need to be established. So it might not solve scalping, but it could be a significant improvement.
DDOS server when not making direct purchase. If there is a financial incentive the process is automated to generate maximum value for the scalper. In our modern age scalpers are not going to be waiting.
Biggest impediment would be changes to purchase process. Run one live user through and repeat for how many bots you want to buy more.
Agreed with your comment on random being better. I just found a scalper sitting at a PC for 20 minutes waiting to buy pretty funny.
I expect Steam is already being DDOS'd probably close to 24/7. DDOS services are cheap, and there's plenty of kids with a card that think they're going to show off their 1334 haxing skillz after getting banned for using an aimbot they also paid for.
They are not exactly great in handling large peaks of traffic. They don't last that long, but they are still there. Controller launch had order processing issues. Any large sale start always have issues. Though it might be less load and more of making tens of thousands of background changes on items on sale.
It doesn't solve scalping, it solves putting everyone in a Red Queen race[0] against the scalpers.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race
I think account age and activity should be weighted into that equation.
I want to agree, but it's hard to figure out what's fair, and I doubt Valve has enough verified data to make it fair right now even if we had a good rule for it. Each way I can think of (account age, gameplay time, games owned, past event participation) has a big issue. Same issue for the Steam Frame, I'd personally love if they weighed my VR time to bump me up the queue, but at the same time it feels like a "the rich get richer" kind of unfairness.
Activity I can understand, but how should age be weighted? Do you intend to prefer younger or older players? Should annual income (or taxable income) also be weighted?
What type of activity? Just purchasing? There's thousands of bot accounts made every day which are active in the sense of playing games, but don't buy very much.
That crosses the line to elitism
Nah, just rewarding loyalty
Maybe weighted is the wrong term, it’s a threshold and that seems prudent.
Maybe, but I don't think it's totally outrageous to say the very first batch of these you can only buy if you had an account for at least 15 years or you must have spent at least $1000 over its lifetime. Then after that first batch it's free for all.
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One issue here is that one, very important for the future of Valve, type of target customer here is first time Steam users : teens without a console nor a (gaming) PC. April 2026 is already going to be a problem for them.
(Though I guess someone in their family can enter the lottery for them.)
> scalpers and their bots would claim a large share of them
Is there any actual data on this? I know people don't like scalpers but I wonder what the actual percentage is.
I would be careful granting that s is less than g. There are lots of incentives other than scalping for people to create extra illegitimate accounts on Steam, and one individual can often control hundreds of bots, whereas a legitimate user almost never has more than one or two accounts.
Even with a hundred or a thousand bots per person you'd need a hell of a lot of scalpers to dwarf Steam's ~130 million active human users.
Japan has done this for concert tickets for years. It works great.
Scalping? What kind of scalping market will there be at these prices?
It's surprising that the whole Western world is discovering the threat of organized or scripted scalping just now, when it's been a problem in places like Japan for over a decade. Account age requirements, lotteries, quick subject matter quizzes to chase away hired line-sitters, hidden ID code on tickets to ban scalpers on auction site pics, randomized queues for sales page etc etc has all been in use for years. It's been so commonplace that various city-run COVID free vaccine programs had different forms of them.
It's been a problem in the West for decades too, for some reason we've only just decided to do something about it
Organized/scripted scalping isn’t new at all in the Western world. Just look at concert/game tickets. It assumed that if you really need it, you’ll alarm clock the release and even then might end up paying a scalper.
Scalpers targeted products sometimes don't last one full seconds. Which means they go from product page -> cart -> checkout -> payment in fractions of a second each, likely through JS injection. It's hardly Selenium speeds. Your alarm clock or Valorant skills are of absolutely no use. That had been the norm for years where scalping has been a problem.
Concert/game tickets are in a extremely different situation. SM doesn't become completely worthless past a certain (near, known) date.
Scalping is much easier to solve, people just wouldn't like it: Lock the device to the purchasing Steam account for a year.
It's just a PC, you shouldn't be able to "lock" it. Either you own the hardware or you don't.
Presumably Valve could record all the serial numbers at the factory and simply block steam logins from accounts don't own a steam machine for the first year or so. The hardware wouldn't be locked, it'd just be steam that refuses to allow logins from the wrong account, steam already sends over your hardware id during the login process so they definitely could use it.
And yes, it's not hard to spoof your hardware id, but who is going to buy a machine at scalper prices only to then need to run sketchy software to even be able to use it. It'd completely kill the scalping market and not affect anyone buying one to use.
Exactly. If you're selling stolen or pirate product at a cut rate, people will tolerate goofiness for the better deal, but if you're scalping and people are paying above-market, they're not going to take the risk on sketchy purchases that may get their Steam account banned or something. And the scalper isn't going to take the risk buying a ton of product they can't unload, so even Valve stating they will enforce this would have a measurable effect.
Imagine buying the SM for a teenager in your family that doesn't have a Steam Account yet.
First: Imagine a situation that won’t happen. A teenager without a steam account?
Second: They could easily allow any account to log in as long as the account that bought it is an actively logged in profile.
If you think that 'teenager' is too old (which I am skeptical about, considering the current popularity of Roblox), replace by 'kid'.
----
More complications, more points of failure.
It's a PC everyone expects to play games from a proprietary platform with an account system. They absolutely could lock how it’s used similar to how cell phones are locked with carriers today. And it would eliminate scalping.
But as I said, you don't like it. ;) Scalping is freedom, if you want to remove scalping, you have to remove some freedom.
I personally wouldn't call it a loss of freedom. You could put another OS on it, without limitations. You just wouldn't be able to log into steam unless it's the correct account, just like steam refuses logins from hardware banned devices and banned accounts.
>> But as I said, you don't like it
"Truth in advertising" in your OP :)
Are hardware IDs reliable at all - I've seen so many companies using HWIDs in their anti-cheats over the years and it has never worked; so I wonder if this would easily be worked around.
It wouldn't be hard, but who would pay scalper prices for something that they then have to run dodgy software on that may or may not jeopardize their entire steam account?
This is a different threat model than anti-cheat. Here you just want it to be annoying enough to stop scalping.
So presumably if you make an account which didn't buy a Steam Machine unable to log in on one, you kill the scalping market. It doesn't have to be perfect to make it unpalatable for scalping. Is a scalper going to take the risk on buying a ton of hardware which they can't offload at a profit without also getting users to hack the thing to get it to work and risk a Steam ban?
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So what you’re saying is we should see an increase in account hijacks and spamming account creation as scalpers now try to optimize for max s.
Show me the incentive structure and…
Spamming account creation won't work, because accounts need to have been created in April or earlier. They also verify address, payment method etc. to reduce double-dipping.
> Spamming account creation won't work, because accounts need to have been created in April or earlier.
Pre-creating "sleeper" accounts is a common way of circumventing this, though it does require a degree of long term thinking/planning.
>You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.
>Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries."
It's not just an account with an age, they have to have made a purchase. And shipping address + payment info also help eliminate duplicates.
I guarantee you there are lots of sleeper accounts out there that have made "a purchase", which could be less than a dollar. It definitely helps to require any purchase at all, but if they were trying to be semi-thorough that requirement would look more like $100 in purchases.
There's probably more to it than that, and Valve just isn't telling us all the details.
It's likely they are weighting accounts that have a lot of (recent) game activity and game purchases as well. Plus, they have access to hardware information via their hardware survey, etc.
It's certainly possible that Valve is not being truthful about the lottery. (Would that be illegal for them to do ?)
I thought sleepers Steam account was already a thing to work-around something - matchmaking limitations in Dota 2 maybe?
Oh yeah I remember reading that in a book about botnets. Valve can only do harm reduction here, but calculating actors will seep through.
Then s/g still applies
Scalping is a good thing, because it gets consoles in the hands of those who want them the most, as evidenced by willingness to pay.
Scalping adds no value to the product.
Scalping also actively damages the pricing, which is part of the product. Valve wants to sell this product at a specific price, which is targeted to an audience. By scalping and ultimately changing the price, you are hurting both the consumer, who now pays more, and the company, who doesn't see a cent of this increase and is now failing its target.
Scalping also damages the demand for the product, since it creates a submarket that is volatile and unpredictable.
Scalping is a bad thing because by basically any measure, a market with scalping is worse for everybody involved than one with scalping. Except for scalpers, who make money off it by making it worse for everybody else. Which is why scalpers are bad people.
Scalping provides the service of exchanging money for time, means, and/or luck. People who have no time to camp, no botting tools or skills, etc can exchange their money instead.
Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market.
Even in this case, there will be scalpers providing for people with more money than luck, who want a day one steam machine.
>Scalping provides the service of exchanging money for time, means, and/or luck. People who have no time to camp, no botting tools or skills, etc can exchange their money instead.
Which, again, hurts both the seller and the vast majority of the buyers.
>Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market.
>Even in this case, there will be scalpers providing for people with more money than luck, who want a day one steam machine.
Scalpers, the vast majority of the time, deal with markets with non-artificial restrictions, and use them to their advantage. In this case, Valve has very intentionally designed a system to prevent scalpers because they want people to have a fair chance of getting a product that is very much not artificially restricted. Valve is free to sell to whoever they want, consumers are free to purchase from Valve, and scalpers are in the middle, exploiting the system for profit, and willingly or not pushing for DRM and for binding accounts to devices.
> People who have no time to camp, no botting tools or skills, etc can exchange their money instead.
But they only need to do that because of the scalpers! The scalpers aren't adding value, they're adding friction and expecting people to pay extra for it!
But they only need to do that because of the scalpers!
Scalpers can only profitably exist when demand at the list price exceeds supply. If you could magically ban scalping, then some number of willing customers wouldn't be able to buy at any price even after jumping through all the hoops.
Yes, that is exactly what a reasonable outcome looks like when the seller doesn't want to increase the price to levels their target customers can't afford. Some people won't be able to buy, but that is because of luck and not privilege.
what's the difference?
Privilege endures. The lucky player gets a good roll against the odds, the privileged player casts loaded dice. You can be privileged because you were once lucky (e.g. you were born to parents who bequeathed their loaded dice to you), but you cannot be lucky because you are/were privileged
Luck of the draw is very different from having the capital to invest in bots and buying up units to resell at higher prices. You could say they're lucky to have that capital, but economic privilege isn't necessarily luck either. Scalpers do not add value to the market no matter how you slice and dice it, they aren't a consumer of the product they're merely capitalizing on demand to create greater scarcity than there otherwise would have been so that they can demand higher prices. A pretty clear value detraction.
I agree, but Im trying to decide what "artificial restrictions...on the market" are and can't come up with anything other than "the problems and solutions occasioned by selling a limited number of items" i.e. distribution problems.
So are scalpers distributors?
Is the onus on the company/market/"all of us" to find "better" (whatever you think "better" is) distribution methods?
> Scalping is a natural "black" market which always pops up to satisfy market demand whenever artificial restrictions are placed on the market.
In which way do you see the market for Steam Machines to be artificially restricted?
Their price is being set artificially below the market demand/supply equilibrium.
The same thing happens when governments set price limits.
The price is being set according with Valve's costs and expected margins. It's not an artificial restriction.
It is "artificial" in the sense that the price is set well below the natural clearing price based on available supply and demand.
What makes that "natural"? I thought currency and finance were human-created concepts.
> satisfy market demand
There's not enough sugar in the world to coat that bullshit.
Scalpers aren't providing anything. The product already exists.
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by basically any measure, a market with scalping is worse for everybody involved than one with scalping
Scalpers benefit customers who are willing to pay the market price but missed out on the lottery and otherwise wouldn't be able to buy at all.
Scalping also damages the demand for the product, since it creates a submarket that is volatile and unpredictable.
Basically the opposite. If there are scalpers, there is a predictable price that I can pay. If there aren't, I have to be lucky or have connections.
Which is why scalpers are bad people.
They are not.
Sometimes systems which reward luck are better than systems which purely reward money. If scalping exists, it often completely eliminates people who are too poor, even if they are true fans or interested parties (e.g. locals unable to attend sports games held in their cities, etc)
Scalpers raise the price only to transfer who loses out — as per your example, where they receive a fee to manipulate which customer misses out (and do so contrary to the wishes of the original vendor).
If you entire business is helping the rich ensure the poor lose and raise the price in general, despite what the original provider may have wanted, you are undoubtedly a bad person.
If that's what you actually wanted then Valve could just sell them at auction and at least have the money going to the company actually making the thing instead of a useless middleman.
Moreover, that's what happens anyway. If you get one of the slots and you value the difference between what you paid and the "real" (resale) price more than you value having the console, you can still sell it. But then more of the money goes to ordinary customers rather than rewarding people who snipe with bots etc.
I would also point out that you can build a PC to run SteamOS with approximately the same specs for approximately the same price, so it's not clear who is going to be paying a significant premium over the sticker price instead of doing that if they don't get a slot.
That is precisely what Valve should do. It is unfortunate that we need scalpers, simply because companies are bizarrely unwilling to adjust their pricing based on market conditions.
> bizarrely unwilling to adjust their pricing based on market conditions.
When they do this, customers have a conniption.
This works fine for luxury goods, because the whole point is that they are expensive, thus exclusive (see: Porsche, Rolex). But for regular goods, this ends up being penny wise, pound foolish. Yeah, there's a short-term bump in revenues and profits, but it gives competition a massive attack surface, as they can pull away the most loyal customers who are angry over price gouging, and those customers are probably lost forever.
> When they do this, customers have a conniption.
In general customers don't actually care. They want the product and are equally annoyed by it selling out before they can get one and it selling for a price they can't afford, both caused by the company not having enough supply to meet current demand.
The actual reason companies don't like scalpers in contexts like this has to do with why Valve is making a console to begin with. Is it because they want to compete with Dell and HP in the market for gaming PCs? No, it's because they want to compete with Microsoft and Sony in the market for distributing games. Which in turn means they want their device to have an attractive price so that more people get one instead of getting a competitor's console. Their expected profit is primarily from selling games rather than hardware.
Selling the initial batch for a higher price is bad for that, because who is going to pay the higher initial price? Their most dedicated customers, who would have bought one from the next batch anyway if they don't get one of these. The ones who would only pay the intended sticker price are the ones who would buy the competitor's console instead of theirs if they had to pay more, and those are the customers they most want to get one immediately before the competition gets their money first.
> In general customers don't actually care.
We'll have to agree to disagree here because in my little bubble people are livid and have been swearing off things due to perceived price gouging. For me it was cereal. I like it but manufactures trying to squeeze $12 a box for it put me off enough that I just don't go down that aisle anymore. Now I eat granola.
I will note that raising the price on something you already produce and have a healthy supply of is quite different from a high introductory price on a new product you can't make enough of.
It's not that bizarre. Not everyone is trying to optimize for maximum profit. Some creators or companies want to build a community by increasing the consumer surplus received by their buyers. They are willing to trade profit for that. Scalpers slip into the middle, take the surplus for themselves, and prevent the community building or other social goods that the seller is trying to create.
Valve is where they are at because Gabe knows he is rich enough and doesn't need to squeeze every penny out of their customers' pocket, nor is there any investors making him do so. Maximizing the price of the steam machine which is already going way above the anticipated price due to component prices skyrocketing will be perceived as a giant fuck you move and burn years of goodwill, erasing a major competitive advantage valve holds over other game storefronts.
The outcome is that only people with the means to pay a lot get a product, so the optics are extremely bad. The optics are much better with a lottery system, as it trades wealth disparity determination for a dumb luck determination.
I don't think we "need" scalpers though, but they are a fundamental part of markets, and arise when you are trying to break the natural flow of markets. Scalpers are the markets punishment for trying to have your cake and eat it too.
Nobody "needs" a scalper.
We do not, in fact, "need scalpers". They don't provide value to anyone except themselves.
Not hard to imagine minimum wage workers wanting some gaming console quite badly and being outbid by tech workers who are vaguely interested.
As an adult I have rarely wanted things as badly as I did when I was a kid. But I can sure outbid them.
I think you might actually be maximally wrong, as those with means have plenty of entertainment options compared to those without.
Your comment made me realize that it's also not hard to imagine we could be a few short years away from a benevolent AI tasked with setting the market and selectively selling to individuals who, as a group, embody some ideal distribution for the company.
Some people argues that, but that's not how scalping works because it first chokes the supply to create a fake demand. The scalper listing prices don't represent the true price on supply-demand curve had there not been artificial meddling through published MSRP, but merely how forcefully they managed to choke the life of the product.
They buy up ALL the stocks. Then puts them on auction sites after supply had hit as close to zero as possible. That's not how economics work by the books.
This would only make sense if everyone has equal ability to pay.
You're right. It's not just aboutwillingness to pay, but also how much someone deserves to own a Steam Machine, which we determine by their ability to pay.
It's not a perfect system, but money is how we as a society determine how to allocate scarce resources. People labor under the promise that having additional money will give them an advantage in this type of situation.
Sounds like you love unregulated free capitalism but correct me if I am wrong. If that’s the case I wonder if you would see things differently if said system strongly disadvantaged you and your loved ones in other areas (health care, housing, education). I think if we derive “deserving” solely by “ability to pay” we loose our humanity.
People labor so they can buy stuff in general, mostly at normal pricing. Nobody labors for the edge case of paying off a scalper to get something, and that situation's mostly going to cause bitterness that they had to work extra because the scalper inflated the price.
Something that only benefits people with the most disposable income is a bad thing. I will preach from any platform that I have that scalpers are shit people.
Save some shade for people who are buying from the scalpers too.
Absolutely no one needs a steam machine.
Scalper:by increasing prices we add the value of enabling people to express their desire more faithfully.
You are right. Basic economic theory says nothing about distribution of value, only about creation of the most value. I don't know why your comment is grey.
But... perhaps these guys are playing a longer game? Reputation has value as well and from other comments this move seems to boost reputation significantly.
If you can't see the human effects scalping has on the market, then, well, you might be a microeconomist
That's just bad ragebait
A sound economic theory after we grant the assumption that all consumers have equal amounts of money.
On a scale of zero to Elon Musk, consumers all have approximately equal amounts of money /s