Reservations for Steam Deck consoles are already being listed on Ebay, with scalpers charging in excess of $1,000 (Ā£726).
Announced last week, the Steam Deck will provide PC gaming on the go in a device that can be connected to a display like the Nintendo Switch.
Preorders for the console went live on Friday at 6pm BST, but the demand for the Steam Deck quickly proved too much for Steamās servers, which crashed. In order to reserve a console, players had to spend Ā£4 and have a Steam account that was more than a month old.
Valve introduced those steps to reduce scalpers, which buy consoles at launch price in bulk and go on to sell individual consoles at an increased price. Scalpers even bought PS5 consoles before units were listed for sale last year.
Valveās attempts to stop scalpers seem to have done little, as there are already many Steam Deck reservations on offer through Ebay. This means that some customers arenāt even buying the console, just the ability to be able to pay for one.
One Ebay listing has the Steam Deck reservation at $1,400 (Ā£1,016) with $300 for shipping. Add in the additional cost of the actual console for $529 and consumers could spend $2,229, which is 321 per cent increase.
Release windows are also affecting the value of the Steam Deck. The base model, which features less memory and could release as soon as this December, is going for the same as 256gb and 512gb models on Ebay.
Valve has indicated that the release windows are just targets, and could be pushed back depending on production. This makes any reservation on Ebay which promises an earlier release unreliable.
Take-Two Interactive has issued a number of DMCA takedowns for popular GTA mods. The notices were sent out earlier this week, which resulted in a number of GTA mods being made unavailable.
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