Valve says Steam Controller sold out 'faster than we anticipated' but previously told us it has knobs it can turn to get more
The Steam Controller has been available to purchase for barely a day and it's already sold out. That's a familiar occurrence around major hardware launches but even Valve is surprised by the sales fervour for the new pad, which mostly sold out in minutes, not hours.
In a post on Bluesky, it promises more are on the way and a timeline for availability is coming.
Steam Controller ran out faster than we anticipated, and we hate that not everyone who wanted one was able to get it. We’re working on getting more in stock and will have an update on expected timeline soon.
— @valvesoftware.com (@valvesoftware.com.bsky.social) 2026-05-05T16:51:33.866Z
Prior to the launch of the Steam Controller, we spoke to Lawrence Yang and Steve Cardinali, both of whom worked on the controller, about availability. In that chat, the two seemed confident about supply.
"We have built up a good supply of this," Cardinali said at the time. Though he noted that this was based on anticipated demand, which, by its own admission today, was lower than reality.
"But it's based on what we anticipate supply to be. And supply could be much larger than we anticipate. In which case our production has a finite limit on how much we can make. And we'll do our best to keep up with demand if it greatly exceeds our expectations."
Yang then told us that Valve has knobs it can turn; one would expect this entails additional orders with manufacturers and assembly capacity to better meet demand.
"We have knobs we can turn to try to get things to people faster," says Cardinali. "It's complicated and you know the mass production machine is a big machine with a lot of momentum. So, depending on how it goes for the first chunk of time, if we have high demand and it stays high demand, there are things we can do to help alleviate that down the road."
The flipside for Valve is how far do you go? Do you risk making too many, which leads to a surplus and high inventory, or try to eke out supply to meet demand over a longer period of time, as it did with the Steam Deck? Valve was stuck with a heaps of excess inventory for the original Steam Controller, though that's not going to be a concern here: the new controller is off to a fine start by comparison.
"If we're like, 'oh, we actually probably need to make more' then we can turn that knob up and have them producing more," Yang says.
The downside to this higher than anticipated demand is that the Steam Controller has already gained attention from scalpers. Some have been selling the controller on eBay for $300, which is a 200% markup, though these appear to be drying up from a cursory look. Potentially as these listings are reported or bought then cancelled over and over again, to make the listings untenable—a strategy we saw employed with graphics cards during shortages.
But, hey, there's sure to be plenty of supply for controllers in the long-run. From my dive inside the controller, there's little here to pose a supply-side risk. No RAM, no storage, just a couple sensors, PCBs and SoCs. While it does take a while to get things shipped around the globe, resupply shouldn't pose a huge issue.
"We try to build enough wiggle room so that we can try not to be out of stock for a really long time," Yang says, rather hopefully.