Online marketplace eBay will take down listings for Valve’s Steam Deck handheld device because the practice violates the website’s Presale Policy, the company told Kotaku. Scalpers were listing various models of the device on eBay just hours after official reservations went live.
Users experienced widespread issues and errors with the Steam Deck pre-registration yesterday due to the significant number of customers trying to lock in a spot. The offering was just an early registration for Valve to gauge a user’s interest in actually purchasing the handheld PC, not an actual pre-order.
Valve required users to put down a $5 registration fee to try and lessen the potential for scalpers to get too many reservations, and the company aims to send out purchase invitations to registered users and begin shipping units in December 2021.
This means that the resellers on eBay are not only listing all three variants of the Steam Deck for more than Valve is selling them, but a majority of them are calling them “confirmed orders” when Valve’s own FAQ for the product notes that it can’t confirm availability yet.
Consequently, these accounts are violating eBay’s Presale Policy, which specifically notes that all pre-sale items listed on the website must ship within 30 days. Even if Valve did ensure that everyone who put down a reservation would be able to order their Steam Deck at the same time, the devices won’t ship until at least December and the listings would continue to break the policy.
As a result, eBay confirmed to Kotaku that these listings would be removed, and this could lead to lowered seller ratings, selling restrictions, and potential account suspensions for the resellers.
At the time of writing, eBay has already removed a majority of the Steam Deck listings. New listings, however, continue to appear on the website.
You can still put your own reservation down for all three Steam Deck models via Steam, though the website now has the earliest shipping for new reservations at Q2 2022 for the 64 GB and 256 GB versions, while the premium 512 GB version is listed for Q3 2022.
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