Steam-kontrolleren er utsolgt, reservasjonskøen strekker seg til 2027

Valve has told Steam Controller buyers that new reservations placed now will likely not ship until 2027, after demand for the $99 pad outran what the company can build by the end of this year. The controller launched on May 4 and, scalpers aside, has been out of stock almost continuously since. It can only be bought directly through Steam, which has funneled all demand through a single channel and forced Valve to revise its estimates.

Three days after the controller went on sale, Valve added a reservation system that places buyers in a queue and emails them when stock returns and their turn arrives. In a blog post on Steam, the company said the queue cut down on customer-side headaches but did not solve the underlying problem: it cannot make controllers fast enough to meet orders.

The Steam Controller page now shows reservation holders one of three estimated order windows, tied to when they reserved. A buyer sees "By September 2026," "By December 2026," or "In 2027." Anyone reserving today falls into the 2027 estimate. Valve says it will tighten those windows as each date approaches, and that the figures update the closer the company gets to shipping.

Valve framed the change as expectation management rather than retreat.

"We have no plans to stop making Steam Controllers. But as we look at the current demand compared to how many we know we can make by the end of the year, we want to manage expectations as much as we can with regards to when folks can expect to receive their order."

— Valve

The reservation terms carry one catch worth noting. When a buyer's place in the queue comes up, Valve emails an option to purchase, and the buyer has 72 hours to complete the order. Miss that window and the reservation drops off the list, and the next person in line moves up.

The pull behind the queue is easy to trace. The Steam Controller price of $99, or £85 in the UK, turns any PC into something close to a Steam Deck, replacing a mouse for parts of the interface while staying comfortable on a couch. It solves two problems at once for living-room PC play, which is the use case driving most of the orders. I run a Deck docked to a television, and the controller's two trackpads and gyro are exactly the inputs that make that setup work without reaching for a keyboard.

Early coverage from Eurogamer placed the pad as a strong upgrade for the players already inclined toward it and a harder sell for everyone else. The same impressions flagged it as a niche product at £85, less obvious a choice than a traditional gamepad for buyers who do not already know they want it. That split matters more now that the queue itself filters out casual interest: anyone willing to wait into 2027 has effectively decided.

The controller is the only piece of Valve's November 2025 hardware lineup actually shipping. When Valve gave an interview on its hardware plans, it cast the controller as a building block for the Steam Machine while aiming it mainly at desktop users. Both the Machine and the Steam Frame headset remain undated, pulled apart from the controller after the global RAM shortage forced Valve to reschedule. Shipping the $99 accessory on its own keeps the platform in front of buyers without holding it hostage to the Machine's supply situation, and I think that staggered release was the right call, even with the queue it has produced. The demand problem is a better one to have than an empty launch slate.

What the reservation update does not address is whether Valve can expand controller output before the 2027 estimates harden into delivery dates. The company says it has no plans to stop production, only that current capacity cannot match current orders. Until that gap closes, the controller stays in the same position the rest of Valve's hardware occupies: wanted, priced, and waiting on parts.

Read also, Valve has raised the Steam Deck OLED to $789 for the 512GB model and $949 for the 1TB, an increase of close to 50% on the larger unit, blaming the memory and storage shortage driven by AI demand. The hike pushes the Deck past a Nintendo Switch 2 on price and sharpens the question of what Valve will charge for the Steam Machine, which uses the same DDR5 memory and SSDs the boom has made expensive.