Disclaimer: This was mostly for my own curiosity, and the estimates are probably flawed in one way or another.
I was wondering how much of the Steam Controller sales went to scalpers. Lots of websites have reported on scalpers reselling the controller, but most of those articles just focus on how much is being asked for the controller, not how many are actually available/being sold. That doesn't really tell us much by itself.
Looking at ebay's sold items, there's about ~240* listed Steam Controllers that have been sold since the announcement.
There's an additional 20 current listing I see for the new Steam controller, that haven't sold yet (weirdly, almost all the unsold listing are located in Australia, with only a single remaining listing for a US seller).
Next question is how many Steam Controllers were available to buy. Approximate estimate for the US was around 35,000-40,000 controllers*. Europe would have it's own supply.
So while there were scalpers, it doesn't seem like they were responsible for a meaningful percentage of the sales.
Additional notes: Valve limited controller sales to 2 per transaction, but didn't limit it to 2 per account. This is speculated to have been a mistake, but still would have limited how many scalpers could have gotten with how hard it was to complete a transaction.
*Math section:
5 pages of results for steam controllers in the ebay sold section, at 60 items per page, so a max of 300 sold. However, none of those pages are just the 2026 Steam Controller, a lot are actually the classic steam controller, hori steam controller, steam link, or other controllers that advertise that they're for steam. I didn't do an exact count for all 5 pages, but only 48 out of 60 results on page 4 were the steam controller 2026, so around ~240 units.
The number of controllers sold in the US is based on the shipment of controllers Valve received. It was 28,500 lbs/12,970 kg. The controller and puck weigh 308g, which would divide out to something like 42,000 controllers in the shipment. After adding in additional packaging, 35,000-40,000 is a more likely estimate. The shipment officially contained 40 packages, so possibly 1000 controllers per package.
How many people do you think really want a steam controller? It costs more than an xbox or ps5 factory controller. TMR isn't unique to the steam controller, the ps4/5 controllers have a trackpad for basic navigating the desktop on a couch, and you can only use it with steam games. (GN review) For any normal person there's very little reason to get it over the myriad of other great controllers out there.
Valve themselves even said they're targeting a niche.
Part of it is just a genuine gamble.
You can try to model demand for a kind of thing that has never specifically existed before.
You will probably fuck that up at first.
Early signs point to -> they significantly underestimated demand.
By how much exactly... shrug?
Also, there's basically no way you can find no difference between the trackpads on the Steam Controller, and the trackpad on the PS controllers, unless you've never used a Steam Deck or the Steam Input system.
Does a PS 4/5 allow you to fully remap all the controls of a game to literally whatever you want?
Add in macros, turbos, input chords, make a joycon be a mouse, make a trackpad be a joycon, or open and navigate a custom ingame menu you made up, or be a new button pad?
Make motion controls activate under whatever conditions you specify, and map that motion to whatever input you want?
Never said there's no difference, just that it's good enough to navigate the desktop on a couch.
Not natively, but they're a normal directinput device so there's plenty of software out there to do it. Plus steam input for steam games.