A Steam deck for $ 4000? Scalpers has secured pre-orders for the laptop from Valve

(Credit: eBay)

As expected, scalpers are already trying to cash in on the Steam Deck by selling confirmed pre-orders for the device for $ 1,000 to $ 4,100.

EBay listings for the Steam Deck began appearing shortly after pre-orders for the portable gaming PC launched on Friday morning. The product itself starts at $ 399. But some scalpers are betting that desperate consumers will pay more.

“WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR MAN?!? ! PAPA’S GOTTA EAT, ”wrote one scalper, who tries to sell his Steam Deck pre-order for $ 5,000 to someone who“ is filthy rich ”.

The first batch of pre-orders for the Steam Deck sold out quickly on Friday morning, which could make the product difficult to obtain once it ships in December. But in the good news, Valve seems to have come up with effective safeguards to keep online scalpers from crashing the party.

To pre-order on Friday, you had to have a Steam account that made a purchase before June 2021. Additionally, each Steam account was limited to a single pre-order, which cost $ 5 to place. As a result, scalpers were essentially prevented from creating bundles of fake Steam accounts to secure multiple pre-orders.

We suspect that the system helped consumers reserve the product. That’s because three PCMag staff members successfully pre-ordered a Steam Deck on Friday morning in what seemed like a miracle, given past terrible launches of the latest PC graphics cards.

The experience was certainly not without hiccups. The main Steam Deck site crashed after preorders opened at 10am PST. Meanwhile, Valve’s payment system initially struggled to process our credit card information. But by 10:15 a.m., the three PCMag staff members had successfully pre-ordered.

Other users weren’t so lucky. For some, a Mistake came out saying their Steam account was “too new” to be able to pre-order on Friday morning, even though they had been Steam users for years. (Valve will be opening preorders for all Steam accounts this Sunday, July 18 at 10 a.m.)

The Steam Deck page showing that new orders won’t be fulfilled until Q1 and Q2 of next year.

Friday’s first batch of pre-orders for the Steam Deck appear to have sold out at 10:41 a.m. That’s when we noticed that Valve’s website had changed order availability for the product to “Q1 2022” instead of December.

However, the Steam Deck site still accepts pre-orders from affected users. But the availability of the 512 GB model has been postponed to “Q2 2022”. This does not bode well for consumers who failed to secure a pre-order.

However, we’ve only noticed around 40 listings for the Steam Deck on eBay so far – another sign that the reservation system has stopped scalpers. By contrast, you can already find over a thousand eBay listings for confirmed pre-order sales for the Nintendo Switch OLED model. Nintendo launched the first batch of pre-orders for the upcoming console on Thursday, which has attracted both consumers and scalpers.