Steam Machine Scalping Falls Short as Resale Margins Shrink

If you've been following the Steam Machine rollout, you already know Valve went with a lottery-style pre-order system where interested buyers threw their names in, hoped for the best, and waited to see if they'd get an email giving them the green light to actually spend their money. It wasn't exactly a clean process, but that's how it worked, and not everyone who signed up ended up getting selected.

Some of those lucky enough to get the email decided they weren't going to keep the Steam Machine at all. Instead, they went straight to eBay to try to cash in. And yeah, listings started showing up fast. The higher-end 2TB model with a controller was going for over two grand, while the baseline Steam Machine, which starts at around $1,050 without a controller, was popping up somewhere between $1,500 and $1,600.

Here's the thing, though, that's actually not great news for scalpers.

A 50 to 60 percent markup sounds like money, but in the resale world, that's pretty underwhelming. Most people flipping hardware want to at least double what they paid. When the margins are that thin, you're not exactly rushing to buy a second and third unit to flip. It takes the wind right out of the sails of anyone who thought the Steam Machine was going to be their next big score.

The math just doesn't work out the way scalpers need it to. What this probably means is that scalpers will move on pretty quickly. Give it a month or two after the initial batch sells through, and they'll shift their attention to something with a better return.

The Steam Machine simply isn't the kind of product that makes resellers want to go all in. The pricing of the Steam Machine itself hasn't been doing it any favors either. Coming in just north of $1,000 with no controller, and closer to $1,150 when you add one in, a lot of people have been walking away unimpressed.

The conversation at TooManyGames this year reflected that pretty well; people were genuinely excited about the Steam Machine right up until the price tag came up, and then the enthusiasm cooled off fast. It stopped feeling like a good deal for what you were getting performance-wise, and that sentiment seems pretty widespread at this point.

The Steam Machine will move some units, no question.

But it's not going to shake up the console market or pull in tens of millions of buyers. Valve will likely keep building out their operating system alongside it, and maybe the bigger win here is that developers start paying more attention to optimization for 8GB of VRAM rather than continuing to push requirements toward increasingly expensive high-VRAM graphics cards that most people can't afford anyway.

That shift alone could end up being more meaningful than the hardware itself. So while the Steam Machine is technically showing up on the resale market, the scalping side of things isn't going the way anyone hoping to profit probably imagined. The margins are too thin, the demand isn't explosive, and the overall buzz around the device has been more lukewarm than electric. For now, it looks like that particular play is backfiring.