Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Controller] - Steam Controller related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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To what end?
They have a legal department, money and an interest in people not reselling their stuff when there is still an waiting que.
There is nothing illegal about it
And, they'd look like dicks if they got legal involved with people who legit ordered them
Fuck scalpers. Opportunistic pieces of shit, all of them. I hope Valve sues them into homelessness.
As much as I hate scalpers, there are no laws broken.
That doesn't mean there shouldn't be. Morality informs legality, not the other way around. Also lawsuits are civil, that's breaking a contract with another entity; "breaking the law" refers to criminal.
Well no. You don't want manufacturers to have more control to define what you can do with things you bought .
I would be a super bad look at steam, and epic of course would jump on it and say they're suing customers..I wouldn't buy steam products either if they started suing people
Scalpers aren't their actual customers so they can get fucked
Again, as much as I'd like scalping to be banned, things don't work that way.
Yet.
Yeah.. Ok.. Let me know how that law will work exactly (provide some wording) that doesn't also screw over people inadvertently.
Also, it would have to implemented worldwide instantaneously, or any region not included will exploit their advantage
This is a "no true Scotsman" argument. Name one law in the history of government that didn't have potential for loopholes.
write an example
There is no clean and good way to write this law imho
When I say loopholes, I mean ones that further harm people affected by scalpers. It's easy to say "oh, we'll write a law". The problem is writing one that doesn't backfire completely.
Which is the problem with every law. If the caveat you're pointing out is inherent to the system in which the solution is being proposed, it's not a reason in itself not to try to improve things. You're letting perfection get in the way of progress. I won't write a fake law to satisfy some BS internet litmus test, precisely because I'm not a lawmaker. That doesn't invalidate my opinion that this is a problem that should be solved. It also doesn't keep Valve from putting some kind of anti-scalping clause in their terms and suing the shit out of people who violate it, which again, is civil law and has absolutely nothing to do with the hypothetical criminal law you're asking for.
There is no good way to write any criminal law, as I said
As a condition of sale (civil) It would potentially completely fuck steams reputation. Gamers don't like companies who sue their customers. If I gift a steam controller to a partner who becomes an ex and they sell it, suddenly I get sued. Great
Every steam critic would use it to attack steam.
You cannot add a condition of sale in many countries to control the resale of a physical product. There are literal ownership laws . Which is the point I'm possibly not making as clear as I need to be
They could just limit 1 per customer and require a deposit to stay in the queue. And offer something beneficial like a free game which directly is added to the account that orders. But that screws people who are getting them as gifts. Or prioritize people based on library size for the initial orders / randomize the queue a bit
The reason I said write the example, is because what is the penalty going to be? Cancel their account? Disable the hardware?
Again, it's a bad idea. You're trying to solve a problem that normally doesn't exist, won't in 6 months and will cause a much bigger one.
As much as I hate scalpers, this is delusional that can not only legally not be enforced in many countries, but would be criminal in many countries and have a huge probability to backfire
You're right, laws are dumb and I will just hunt down the scalpers myself.
Good luck with that
Thanks, already got 3
Feel free to provide an example law.
Because, such a law would have to be world-wide, and require a whole new framework to work, or people in countries without the law will abuse their position
Like any of us here, I also hate scalpers to no end. But let's be realistic here, there's nothing Valve can do about scalpers (at least not legally). That was the reason for my question. Email Valve to let them know about scalpers, online or otherwise, then what?
Now, if everyone chose to never buy from scalpers, if everyone would prefer to miss out before paying horrible people ridiculous prices because of hype, scalpers would eventually disappear.
But just like avoiding mainstream social networks, the convenience of Google, Apple and Microsoft, enjoying same day delivery from Amazon or forking over an extra 40% to get food over Uber Eats instead of getting off of our asses to go get something to eat is unimaginable to most people out there, too many would rather spend a month's worth of rent on things they want, but don't really need due to FOMO.
You are absolutely correct in your statement.
If we want to block scalpers and predatory businesses (not talking about Valve here) we need to start somewhere. Some of us already do self-hosting, moved to Lemmy and Mastodon, and dropped Microslop for some type of Linux distros, but we're a ridiculous minority.
In my case, some of the people in my life even started calling me to ask me for suggestions to start getting away from those companies, same people that told me I was paranoid and "voluntarily suffering for no reason" when i eliminated Facebook and WhatsApp. And, of course, even now that they see that I was right all along, when I say "close all the Meta bullshit" and such, the response is, invariably, but that's how I communicate with everyone.
So, yeah, scalpers will keep scalping, predatory businesses will keep at it too, because they can, and there's nothing any of us can do about it, other than sit back, relax, and watch all the users cry their eyes out when shit hits the fan. I'm pretty sure we're not far from that moment.
🤷
If Valve wanted to be petty they know what Steam account the preorder for each serial number of Steam machine came from(they know family accounts as well, etc). They could stop you from logging into Steam on any account that isn’t that one for some duration of time. It’s not fool proof and likely depends on the OS reporting hardware information correctly but they could make it a big enough annoyance to deter people. Once the supply catches up and scalpers are less interested the whole system could just be dropped. It likely isn’t worth the effort to set it up and manage complaints though.
I believe they could in theory do something like that, with limited success. Nothing is keeping anyone from creating hundreds of new steam accounts just to purchase the hardware. If the scalpers never fire up the steam machines, and sell them, it would be horrible for Valve to start punishing people that Vought those devices if they log in and they can tell the serial number or something.
It would be very complicated for Valve to do something about this, with very little reward for them or the actual final owners.
At the end of the day, they are selling like crazy, way above what I thought they would due to pricing, and scalpers taking them off of their hands is still revenue for them.
I still believe the only thing that can stop scalpers is letting them purchase 1 or 2 whole batches of whatever, and never buy from them, not even if they match the price on Steam. Let them keep all that inventory to rot.
But that's not happening, so.
There was something in place to prevent scalpers from just making hundreds of accounts though. The registration opened on June 22nd for reference.
They also randomized the initial signup and did it over a few days to give themselves time to validate accounts. So if your account was only a few days old prior to April 27th and you bought a $1 game with zero play time you probably still got caught.
Here’s the link for those screenshots. They did more than most to try and limit bots/scalpers. Edit: This was also posted on June 22, so they’d have to have had insider knowledge or already had hundreds of accounts spun up.
Oh, from my perspective, Valve is the one business I don't mind throwing money at today. Every other large corporatiin out there has gone to shit entirely. Even Ubuntu and RedHat have their little things I can't stand.
Steam's emailbox I presume.