Valve's Steam Machine sold out in Japan almost immediately, and in the US, scalpers are asking roughly double the official price.
Retailer Komodo Station put the Steam Machine directly on shelves in Japan — no reservation lottery — and stock vanished fast. Back in the US, some eBay sellers are listing their reservation slots for as much as $3,500 for the 2TB model, which carries a $1,349 MSRP. At least one sale appears confirmed at $2,800, which is roughly double the asking price. Most listings haven't sold yet, and buying a reservation from a stranger on eBay means trusting that stranger to actually follow through.
The sellout and the secondary market frenzy look like demand, but scarcity does a lot of work here — Valve's lottery-based reservation system virtually guarantees thin launch supply. That constraint, not a groundswell of mainstream enthusiasm, is likely doing most of the heavy lifting.
Meanwhile, cheaper Chinese clone PCs are surfacing online, including one Reddit example priced around $688 that claims a Ryzen 5 5500, 16GB of DDR5, and an RX 6750 GRE GPU in a compact chassis. The spec sheet alone has problems: the Ryzen 5 5500 uses the AM4 platform, which does not support DDR5. The RX 6750 GRE is also a physically large card that may not fit the pictured case. Add unknown thermals, an opaque returns process, potential import costs, and the possibility of a compromised SteamOS build, and the bargain evaporates.
Valve's own pricing was already pushed up by the ongoing RAM shortage, which makes a DIY alternative harder than it would have been a year ago. If the official price feels steep and the clones feel sketchy, that's because both things are true at once.