Valve has started sending reservation emails for the Steam Machine ahead of its June 30 launch, and resale marketplaces are already full of inflated listings—from listings near $1,700 to offers as high as $3,200 for bundles that haven’t shipped yet.
Valve hasn’t even hit the “ship it” button yet, but the resale frenzy is already taking shape.
Reservation emails for the Steam Machine have started going out ahead of its June 30 launch. and scalpers have moved fast to turn that waiting period into a profit opportunity. The device itself is already a tough sell. with RAM and SSD prices having dragged hardware pricing across the industry into something most buyers didn’t budget for. Valve has previously said it would like to lower the price if component costs improve—yet that context only makes the resale markups harder to ignore.
Listings are showing up on third-party marketplaces like eBay with numbers that look more like fantasy than pricing. Some sellers are asking around $1,700. That’s already a steep jump over Valve’s official pricing of $1. 049. before any buyer even considers what they’re actually paying for: a console that hasn’t launched.
The outliers are where the scale becomes almost comedic. One eBay listing for the base 512GB Steam Machine bundle with the Steam Controller has been priced as high as $3,200. Valve’s official price for that same bundle is $1. 128. meaning the listing is being advertised at nearly three times what Valve charges for a kit that still hasn’t been released.
And at least one of the inflated listings may have crossed the line from “aspirational” to “paid.” A post on X by @HardwareSteam—shared via Notebookcheck—notes that a listing priced at $2. 800 has been marked as sold. Whether that transaction holds or reverses with the usual marketplace churn. the signal is already clear: some people are willing to pay scalper prices before the console is even in hand.
The comparison that hangs over all of this is PlayStation 5. When limited PS5 stock met massive demand, the console became scalper bait for months. Right now, the Steam Machine situation doesn’t look anywhere near that bad. There appear to be only a few live listings on eBay. and Valve’s reservation queue seems to be doing at least part of what it was designed to do—keeping the biggest floodgates closed for the moment.
Still, it’s too early to declare victory. Anti-scalping measures don’t get fully tested until devices are actually shipping and buyers begin checking tracking numbers instead of reservation emails. Valve’s real stress test comes once the Steam Machine launches on June 30 and mass shipping begins. when demand and availability will collide in the open.
Valve Steam Machine scalpers resale prices eBay reservation emails June 30 launch Steam Controller hardware pricing
That’s wild… $3,200 for something not even shipped yet. People are insane.
I didn’t even know this thing was real tbh. If Valve’s official price is like $1k and scalpers are asking $2k+ then yeah nobody with a brain is buying that. But watch, some YouTuber will still “test” the $3k bundle and then I’ll see it on my timeline anyway.
So wait, Valve emailed reservations and then eBay magically had listings? That sounds like Valve caused it, like they announced it too early. Also $1,049 vs $1,128… are those even the same deal or is the article just messing with numbers? Either way scalpers gonna scalp.
This reminds me of PS5 days but like… Steam Machine edition. The part about the sold listing is crazy though, like someone really paid $2,800 just off a reservation email? And the hardware pricing thing—RAM and SSD being expensive—ok cool but that’s literally just gonna make scalpers prices “make sense” to them, unfortunately. I’m not paying triple for a box that doesn’t even exist in my hands yet.