Edit: to this rant because I think they deserve it. I'm guessing they did have a ton out bot orders that they cancelled because they are back in stock and my order went through.
They said they were combating bots. I tried checking out as soon as the new decks went on sale. I was going to get the limited edition. Once their servers finally caught up it said it was out of stock. I tried switching to the 1TB non limited edition and they said "you've been trying to make too many purchases". I finally got through again and it said the regular one was out of stock. How was it not bots buying these of a regular user couldn't get through.
Even if bots were non existent there's an insanely high demand for not a lot of supply. People really need to start going into things with better expectations, knowing that it's going to be a madhouse and more than likely they will have to wait.
I remember trying to get a 3000 series graphics card in 2020. Shit just hard to get now, gaming is more profitable than movies now. Fact is day 1 it's always going to be like this - forever
Could also have just been some regular buyers getting lucky while others didn't get through. Bots would have had the same issues, getting through the broken servers.
I just bought a 512 OLED here in Europe and it was unreal how easy it was to buy. I logged in an hour after sales went live, put in my information and clicked buy. That’s it. Estimated delivery in 3-5 business days, and I honestly don’t know if I actually trust that.
Edit: It arrived last night! They actually pulled it off!
Honestly, I think the anti-glare might have been fine. I got the 512 because it was cheaper and I had heard some of the concerns about the vibrancy of the anti-glare. In retrospect, I doubt I would have cared that much. Plus the extra storage and dual case would are a pretty compelling value proposition as well.
Keep trying, it came back in stock for me, and I got that message on the OG deck preorder day, but still managed to get in with a pretty early ship date.
Yeah, I got the error page a bunch of times, then the "we're out of stock", and finally, an order confirmation! I suspect the servers were just overloaded - valve is definitely underestimating demand - and then they were running into fulfillment issues that have slowly been sorted out.
There's no doubt some bots got some, but I think there's a lot of happy second steamdeck owners today as well..
I don't think it's a matter of underestimating demand. Granted, I don't know anything about scalability in terms of infrastructure for this stuff, but I figure they may have just figured it not worth it to scale things up for a demand that will fix itself within hours.
I did get a limited edition one after 2 hours of trying minutes after the launch.
I also got that error about too many purchases, logged me out a handful of times, out of stock only to say failed to initiate order a dozen times after that but finally got one.