Man I even got thru checkout but then discovered on the orders page it was still pending. Ended up getting cancelled so some scalpers probably already got mine.

Well...

https://www.pcgamesn.com/pc-retro-tech/ega-graphics

Pity the poor PC of 1983-1984, before EGA graphics changed everything. It wasn't the graphics powerhouse we know today. IBM's machines, such as the IBM PC 5150, and their clones might have been the talk of the business world, but they were stuck with text-only displays or low-definition bitmap graphics.

The maximum color graphics resolution was 320 x 200 on a CGA graphics card, with colors limited to four from a hard-wired palette of 16. Even at the time, you'd have a hard time convincing someone that this was really the best graphics card you could buy. Worse, three of those colors were cyan, brown, and magenta, and half of them were just lighter variations of the other half.

You can see in the screenshot from The Secret of Monkey Island below that 16 colors make all the difference, with EGA on the left and four-color CGA on the right.

However, EGA had one big problem; it was prohibitively expensive, even in an era when PCs were already astronomically expensive. The basic EGA card price was over $500 (around $1,400 today), and the Memory Expansion Card cost a further $199.

Go for the full 192KB of RAM and you were looking at a total of nearly $1,000 (approximately $2,900 in today's money), making a top-end EGA card way more expensive than the GeForce RTX 4090 today. What's more, the monitor you needed to make the most of it cost a further $850 (approximately $2,500 today). EGA was a rich enthusiast's toy.

They don’t call it HARDware for nothin!

I mean, they aren't going to stop making them if there are people buying them. I'm sure that, at some point, there will be enough manufactured to catch up with demand.

2026 has been a pretty exasperating year to try to get ahold of a lot of pieces of hardware, I have to say.

I'm wondering if

assuming Valve still is trying to release the Steam Machine this year, which according to the last news I've seen, they're still saying that they're going to do

this shortage is gonna dick up their Steam Machine sales. I mean, the Steam Controller is a nice-to-have on a regular PC, but for people with a Steam Machine in the living room, they probably are going to want it even more

like, there it's a lot more important to have the touchpads to replace a mouse, remote power-on capability, etc.

I just reserved one. It will likely become a Xmas or birthday present.

I was thinking about getting one, but then I read more about it and realised you can't really use it without the Steam client. Kind of put me off since I have a large part of my library on GOG. Maybe this won't be a problem in the future though.

Reserved it on the day it restocked. I don't think I got an email after reserving it, but I got one for it being available to buy on the 5.6.

I set an alarm on May 8th the moment they opened reservations. Got an email on June 11th asking for me to confirm my purchase details and submit an order. Submitted that day and then received the controller on June 17th.

Try contacting support, apparently they let some people still order their missed reservation.

A queue system really undercuts any scalper that would consider the controller a good target. There will of course be people without patience that could payout, but the larger market will just wait until their turn to order comes up. Seems like a bad investment for someone that relies on FOMO to profit.

When they initially went on sale, apparently scalpers flooded the thing. They put a reservation system in place for the Steam Controller to aim to defeat scalping. This new shortage is with that reservation system in place, limit on two Steam Controllers per account and the Steam account needs to be in good standing. Now, I guess it could be possible that scalpers went out and figured out how to defeat that, like having a number of people collude to purchase two each, so one can't say that there's no scalping...

EDIT: It looks like the going rate on eBay for a sealed-box Steam Controller 2.0 is about $300, so I imagine that that's what market rate is at current levels of supply. Some lower prices get down towards $200. Valve's selling them for $99.

Valve was really dumb on the launch of the Steam Controller, without requiring anything and every bot and scalper could buy as many as they want. I can't believe they did not have any protection on! This is a major part in shortage of the Controllers I think. They had all the knowledge and tools learned from the Steam Deck launch. So... what I mean is Valve is handling the launch of Steam Machine differently then they did with the first batch of Steam Controller. Also the price is much higher and is no longer in the "impulse buy 2 of 'em" category.

And yet, I will be wrong, followed by a Steam Machine shortage.^^