Steam Deck reservations are about to go live, and Valve has a plan for keeping things above board.
The Steam Deck portable PC comes out in December, but you’ll be able to reserve a device later today, June 16, and ahead of that pre-order scramble, Valve has put in place countermeasures to stop scalpers or bots from making multiple purchases with a view to reselling units and fleecing gamers. Thanks to supply issues and component shortages, this kind of nefarious price gouging has been happening far too regularly in recent times with all kinds of hardware – from graphics cards to consoles – so it’s unsurprising that Valve is thinking ahead here. As the firm says, it wants to put a roadblock in the path of “potential unauthorized resellers”. As you might expect, only one Steam Deck reservation will be allowed per Steam account, but Valve has also implemented a restriction to stop freshly created Steam accounts from making a purchase at all – at least initially over the opening weekend. To make a pre-order later on today, or tomorrow, any given Steam account must be in “good standing” and have made a purchase on Steam before June 2021.
