Finally some requirements before scalpers do their work.
Could they not just lock the controller to the purchased account for the first 1 or 2 months? If you want to buy it for someone else you can use the gift option. Of course people could still resell it, but the people who buy the scalped controllers wouldn’t be able to use it for two months, and the original account gets flagged as a scalper, and maybe banned if it’s against ToS? And if you don’t like your controller you can either just return it or wait out the lock-out period. But there are probably issues I’m missing.
Hardware DRM, basically. Hell no.
I would rather they do what they are doing, limit to 1 unit, and have some history prior.
I would even be OK with some level of priority by age or played hours, but I understand this is not something people would agree
Yep definitely would not have bought if they pulled something like that, as effective as it may have been to prevent scalping
I rather have a temporary DRM then not have a controller at all because of scalpers. But too each his own. The history stuff doesn’t work because the scalpers already have their steam accounts from the steam deck days. Or they will now for the frame or machine. They just buy one or a few of those dumb $1 games, keep it open it for a few days, and voila you got your in good standing account. And they could just create multiple of those. And all that doesn’t even matter if the scalpers are just normal steam users anyway.
We got the steam social credit score before GTA VI.
Good to know. Thanks. It’s crazy they didn’t do this from the beginning.
There was a full news cycle of tech folks talking about how “they are so in demand, they sold out instantly.” Build the hype with free press.
Valve has enough experience with this to know exactly what they were doing.
They have like 150 people working there. I’m not sure that’s more likely than they just flubbed something.
I think they wanted to leave a bunch of scalpers as bag holders. It’s kinda genius. Let the scalpers go crazy buying a shitload of controllers, then later let actual consumers buy and reserve. So actual players have a reason NOT to buy from the inflated scalpers, and the scalpers are left with a bunch of controllers they can’t sell because everyone is buying them at fair price.
And the scalpers will have a hard time buying up the second stock, because many of them likely already blew a lot of money the first time, and the second time will require a lot of bottery that will be even more expensive to try and pull off.
There is no way that this is why.
Sure, but a decent side effect.
If I remember correctly they did setup a similar reservation system for the Steamdeck when it came out?
They set it up for the Index before then
Whooo!!! That’s really good news for me, I was bummed to miss out on the first drop
I know it’s probably to stop scalpers, but it does seem weird that there are requirements that need to be met in order to even buy one.
I think the biggest one for me is the “account must be in good standing”
why? Hackers keep losing. Seems like a good reason to me.
On the other hand there there are also games that may erroneously flag accounts for cheating using false positives from other anti cheat systems. Can’t remember the exact details but iirc CoD had this issue a few years back and it affected the VAC status of Steam accounts.
I’ve seen some people with 5+ year old VAC bans still have good standing on SteamDB. Not sure if thats the same thing valve is looking at, though
I have a 22 year old steam account, played every cod on there, every decent multiplayer shooter that came out the past 22 years, not once did I get a false ban on that account. Cheaters love to lie. Vac has always reverted false vac bans if there was one that happened to people.
Your first problem was still playing Call of Duty in this day and age. After Activision fucked over paying Infinity Ward developers back in 2010, the writing was on the wall. The franchise should have been abandoned be fans and it’s only been downhill every release since further proving that.
I think is unfair to say playing one of the best popular game series that has been popular for 20 years is the players fault.
Those games are total trash now, but that’s not the point.
I think is unfair to say playing one of the best popular game series that has been popular for 20 years is the players fault.
Popular, yes. Best, is extremely debatable.
After 2010, the games dropped off a cliff. Infinity Ward were the ones that brought the series back from death in the first place. Treyarch were always the second tier COD studio, and it showed after half the IW team left to form Respawn Entertainment.
Although I guess we should sort of be happy that happened since we got Titanfall out of it. That would never have happened otherwise.
Well I think it’s totally fair. We are talking specifically about the dipshits that make preordering and DLC basically standard now.
They keep buying it even when it’s trash, money talks.
This is 100% to curb scalpers… When the initial rush has cleared, I’m pretty sure they will loosen the restrictions
It’s not even enough though, if it doesn’t even require you to have purchased games before people have multiple accounts.
The account needs to have a game purchased before April 27th.
From the article:
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Your account must be in good standing on Steam
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You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27, 2026
Most accounts make a purchase, as its a requirement to unlock most of Steam’s features and most accounts are in good standing.
A purchase within the last year would be better, but I think they are not concerned with scalpers. This system makes people have less fear of missing out and gives Valve more numbers of how many they actually need to produce.
If you know anything about production pipelines, you also know that there’s zero chance that the production pipeline can respond in any way to the amount of reservations… Every controller that gets produced in at least the next year has already been ordered by Valve… Any scaling of the production pipeline in response to reservations won’t happen for a very long time.
Purchase can be just a 1 cent game, and free games you add to your library might count, that’s the definition of an alt account.
Sure, you could just buy a 1 cent game… However the date is in the past. So a scalper would have needed to set up a lot of accounts in advance even before the controller itself was released, and then have purchased something on all those accounts… To me this seems like a very reasonable way to distinguish legitimate players from the scalpers.
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