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.
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.