Dozens of scalped listings popped up on eBay offering baseline reservations at significant premiums.
Scalpers didn't waste any time. Before the Steam Machine even launches, people are flipping their reservations on eBay for $2,700 to $2,900. That's roughly double Valve's actual price.
The 2TB Steam Machine officially costs $1,349. On eBay, the same reservation is going for nearly triple that. And people are actually buying them.
This Is What Always Happens
Scalping is endemic at this point. Every successful hardware launch gets hit the same way. AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D Anniversary Edition? Sold out instantly, resold on eBay for nearly 2X retail. GPU launches, console restocks, limited-edition sneakers-if supply is tight and hype is high, scalpers show up. And buyers keep feeding them money.
The Steam Machine has it worse because supply is already constrained. Valve told everyone upfront that it can't make as many units as it wants because RAM and storage are impossible to source. Scalpers know this. So they're selling pre-orders for thousands of dollars, betting that someone will panic and overpay rather than wait for Valve to restock.
The Math Doesn't Add Up
This is where it gets absurd. You could spend $2,700 on a Steam Machine reservation from a scalper, or you could build an actual gaming PC for $2,000 with a Ryzen 9070 XT, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD. That PC would be significantly faster than the Steam Machine. Faster CPU. Better GPU. More RAM. And you'd still have $700 left over.
The Steam Machine doesn't justify its official $1,049 price. Scalping it at $2,700 makes it completely indefensible.
Why People Actually Buy This
The only way this works is if someone buys it. And they do. People panic. They think the device will be unavailable forever. They convince themselves it's worth the premium. And scalpers profit off that panic.
The only fix is if people stop buying. If every scalper listing sits unsold for a week, they disappear. But that requires buyers to actually think about what they're doing instead of just clicking the buy button.
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