This guy will have to wait for his younger brother.
It was available to buy starting noon local time. I refreshed the page until the buy option became available, but kept getting an error when submitting payment. Waited about half an hour and now it’s sold out. Ni modo I guess.
Practically there wasn’t really a difference with the Steam Deck. You still had everyone rushing at the same time to get the deposit in. People got errors during the check out, just like this time and scalpers popped up immediately as well.
Sure, you might have had a few people less, trying to buy it, if you restrict by age, but the controller was announced last year. Do you want Valve to sell the first controllers only to accounts that are older than 6 months or a year? Or do you go by the time the review embargo was up, which got broken because a few reviews leaked early.
And? With the queue, people were able to continue submitting orders as things calmed down. There will always be a rush to be first. The queue handles it better by not outright denying those who didn’t make it in right away. This also reduces the FOMO that funds scalpers’ abuse of the system.
As for account age, it doesn’t really matter when it is set at - any limitation reduces the number of bots able to spam real users out of a purchase. Admittedly, that only really helps if there’s also a limit on number of units bought, which I don’t think was implemented this time, either, for whatever reason.
I really expected them to make some better system than ‘just hit buy until you’re lucky’
There was no queue for the Deck, I mean, there was, but that came after. Everyone was stuck in the same screen as Monday hitting refresh until we were able to get through. I started trying to buy mine on the dot and only managed to get it over 15 minutes afterwards. I didn’t get into the first batch because of that.
The was absolutely a queue.
Source: I was in it.
Yes, but getting into the queue had the same issues as the controller did now. I was also in the queue and it took me 17 minutes to get in it, which made it so that my deck wasn’t on the first batch even though I hit purchase the second it went live (as you might remember we had to pay a small fee to get in the queue, and processing those payments overloaded the servers like now). So, like I said, there was no queue, that came after you made the payment which put your name in the queue at the time you paid, if that’s your definition then the Steam controller also has a queue (assuming they prepare and send the orders in order).