Steam Deck: eBay blocks pre-sales at insane touts

Steam Deck: eBay blocks pre-sales at insane touts

Steam Deck

The COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent scarcity of technological components has made the problem of touting more and more evident. We have seen it with PS5 and to a lesser extent with Xbox Series X, it is coming back in these hours with Steam Deck, Valve's portable console. Tech giants and retailers are trying to find solutions, but it is often difficult to stem a phenomenon that is child of the free market. It is true, in fact, that some not very nice touts are selling consoles at crazy prices, but there are just as many crazy people who spend those amounts to get the machine before the others. Often getting scammed in the meantime. It's the good and bad of the free market. To try to calm prices and avoid unsatisfied customers, eBay has decided to intervene by blocking the presales at crazy prices.

It did so by finding a kind of technicality that allows it to cancel the presale of those items. which are not shipped within 30 days. And with Steam Deck slated for late year / early 2022, this has allowed the online store to wipe out dozens of $ 2000 or more listings. For a machine worth 679 at best.

Steam Deck "We understand how frustrating it can be for gamers to see overpriced listings for presale hardware," writes eBay. "To comply with eBay's presale policy, listings must state that they are 'presale' items and must guarantee shipping within 30 days of purchase. As Steam Deck will ship much later, these listings violate our policy and we are working to remove all product listings. "

Sellers and buyers will likely find other channels to trade, but not being in the largest and most popular stores may discourage some users.

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Valve says the Steam Deck runs every PC game it’s tried, if you’re happy with 30fps

One of the more curious aspects of Valve’s recently revealed Steam Deck is just what sort of performance will be on tap from the custom Zen 2 and RDNA 2-based APU. While we still haven’t seen actual benchmarks for the handheld gaming PC just yet, Valve makes some lofty claims by telling IGN that the new device has the “level of performance required to run the latest generation of games”, and that “we haven’t really found something that we could throw at this device that it couldn’t handle”.


You’ll need to temper your expectations, however, as Valve stated that the performance level it’s targeting is lower than what you’d usually find on the best gaming monitor. The device sports a native 800p resolution screen and aims to hit an average frame rate of 30fps, putting it more in line with previous generation consoles than PC gaming.Of course, less demanding games will bea> able to make the most of the display’s upper 60Hz limit, but it’s still not clear exactly which ones will be able to reach above 30fps.


It remains to be seen how the Steam Deck’s performance will differ when users go down the route of installing Windows onto the device over its native Linux OS, as games could run smoother on one or the other.


You’ll want to hit those higher frames if you’re planning to play FPS games on the device, where a smoother frame rate is more important. Even still, 30fps is impressive when you consider the form factor of the Steam Deck, and it’s similar to what we see on other handheld devices like the Nintendo Switch</a>.