In what was probably an inevitability, the reservation system for the Steam Deck has apparently been overloaded, broken, and plagued by scalpers and bots. Some people were not able to obtain their consoles because they were stuck in a broken ordering system. Others were afraid they were too far back in the queue and would not be able to get a Steam Deck because supplies would run out. It’s deja vu all over again for those who attempted to pre-order the next-gen consoles.
Valve was attempting to avoid such issues by using a reservation system for the Steam Deck. Users could only make the reservations on Steam, and they both had to have accounts in good standing and had to have made a purchase before last June. However, it doesn’t appear these methods were entirely successful, as reserved copies of the console are already popping up on eBay for absurd prices (it goes without saying, but we encourage you not to buy from these sellers).
Gamers who attempted to reserve their copies ran into several problems. Some were told their accounts, which fulfilled both of the aforementioned requirements, were not eligible to reserve the copies. Those who managed to add the console to their cart were often served error messages saying that the purchase couldn’t be fulfilled. Sometimes they made it as far as payment methods, only for their attached PayPal accounts to fail them.
If any of these issues are sounding familiar, it’s because they are basically the same ones that bedeviled gamers who tried to pre-order the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles. In those instances, users would be able to add the items to their carts from whatever service they were ordering it from, only to be stuck in purchase purgatory as they weren’t able to get the purchases to go through.
Source: Kotaku