You needed a Steam account of a certain age and some activity in the past. Sure, people immediately tried to resell them at ridiculous prices, but look up how many were offered and bought on eBay. It’s a drop in the bucket. What they did fuck up was severely underestimating the demand. It shows that they usually deal with digital products.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
For the launch of Steam Controller there was no restrictions on the Steam account of age or activity. After they got surprised, with the second batch next week, they started to implement the same account restrictions as they did on Steam Deck. And I believe the orders of first batch was the majority of controllers they had planned to sell in isolation without the Steam Machine and Frame. Now they have to restock and try to fill the demand that they also understimated.
The reason why you didn’t see much on eBay was, because they were mass reported quickly from the Steam community. Because eBay has some rules that does not allow them sell products they don’t yet have.