These days it's hard to tell and there's always a mix of both with any high demand items so it makes the stock limits even more pronounced. With how Valve has done hardware releases lately though I imagine it's more a stock limitation.
reply> These days it's hard to tell
replyIs it really? I go to my "local" second-hand marketplace and I see countless of listings for the new Valve Controller. I think it's fair to say most of those aren't "Ops, I made a purchase and I can't return it" but most likely being scalpers. No doubt, some of them are fake as well, but regardless, tends to be fairly easy to see when things are being scalped or if it's actually just high demand, if it's the latter, you don't see tons of second-hand listings the day after it opened.
I understand but you don't know how many people got one to keep it compared to how many just resell it.
reply> but you don't know how many people got one to keep it compared to how many just resell it
replyBut you do? If someone puts it up on second-hand markets, they're not intending to keep it, they're intending to resell it, why put it up otherwise?
Right, they're saying you only see the side of the resellers, you have no idea the number of people who purchased it to keep it (like many of us in the thread). So in reality you may be only seeing less than 1% of stock for resell and not the 99% that are just buying it to keep it like normal. It's just confirmation bias that you assume everyone is buying to resell it cause that's all you're able to see.
replyI also got one and didn't think scalpers were the problem at the time. I have since seen eBay listings of people trying to sell the controllers (that they don't even have yet) for 3x the price, though, so they maybe did play a role. There was a limit of 2 controllers per Steam account and they sold out within 30 minutes, so not sure if bots were used or what. There wasn't a lot of time to mess around. I've seen a lot of people who wanted one couldn't get one. Personally I added it to my cart about 2 minutes before the official start time and then it took 12 minutes or so of retrying to actually check out.
replyI added it to my cart 2 minutes before and spent 3 hours trying before realizing that just because it's in your cart doesn't mean it exists since it was actually out of stock.
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