Valve claimed that the limited edition steam deck would “not go into preorder / backorders” when it sold out, because they claim that they’ve already made the only ones that are being sold.

This is either an outright lie, or they changed their plans after the chaos that occured in the first 30-45 minutes.

A) it has a 2-4 week delivery estimate for the only 2 countries they’re selling it. Both countries where the standard OLED is 3-5 days. If they’re both already manufactured and ready to go, there’s no reason for such a huge discrepancy in shipping time.

B) It very briefly showed a much faster shipping time before cutting to “sold out” for nearly a half hour. If they’re telling the truth, then its possible it was manually cut off to slow down orders while the checkout system got a break. If they’re lying (I’m pretty certain that’s the case), then my guess would be it actually sold out. They had a threshold for demand that they met or exceeded, and they used that to justify triggering a pre/back order listing that’s disguised as a ‘ready to go’ system with an absurd fulfillment estimate.

It’s pretty common practice in online retail to do that when you don’t want to scare off customers with the words “preorder” or “backorder”. But in this case it’s to make it look like they’re not lying about their claim that it’s actually limited.

At the end of the day while this is good for settling down demand, it’s really bad to be deceptive about the true nature of “limited edition” hardware.

Just my 2 cents.