Surprising nobody, Valve's Steam Controller is already sold out

Valve’s Steam Controller only went on sale yesterday, May 4, and has already sold out. It did so within 30 minutes in some territories.

The Stream Controller was initially listed as available within 3-5 days when it appeared on the UK Steam Store, but you’re now not even able to pre-order a pad. It’s simply listed as “out of stock.”

This is despite the Steam Controller selling for significantly more than a standard Xbox pad or PlayStation DualSense, at £85 ($99.99, $149AU, €99).

Predictably, opportunistic eBayers are currently listing “presale” Steam Controllers for upwards of £150, almost double the retail price.

Valve has not given any clues as to how many of the pads it produced for this initial batch, but the Steam Controller currently sits at number one on the Steam Store’s Top Sellers chart. Let’s get real, though. Valve does not produce its gaming hardware at anything like the scale of Nintendo or Sony.

Some estimates from 2025 place Steam Deck sales at around four million, after three-plus years on sale, while the Nintendo Switch 2 sold four million units within a handful of days.

The Steam Controller has been met with strong initial reviews, and the basic concept is a pad that lets you play any Steam game fairly well, not just ones made primarily for gamepad play.

To that end, it adopts the slightly more unusual inputs seen in the Steam Deck, including a pair of touch-sensitive pads, which sit below each of the analogue sticks. The pad also has what Valve calls “grip-enabled gyro,” which lets the Steam Controller behave like a motion controller when you grip the handles.

Valve’s Steam Deck relied on touch-sensitive analogue sticks for the same job of entering gyro control.

This is Valve’s second stab at a console-like pad that can also handle games optimised for mouse or trackpad input. The first was also called the Steam Controller, and came out in 2015. It used two giant clickable trackpads that take centre stage over analogue sticks.

While that older design looks less busy than the new one, the current consensus is the more Steam Deck-like approach of this second generation is a major improvement. The first-gen pad was discontinued in 2019, and is now seen as a bit of of curio from years past.

Both of these Steam gamepads were made to accompany Steam Machines — console-like gaming PCs intended to open up Steam gaming to an even wider audience. The first wave of these was a largely dismal failure, despite hardware partnerships with brands including Dell’s Alienware and ZOTAC.

This time around, Valve is producing the Steam Machine itself, and it looks like it has bags of potential, but it has not had the best of luck with timing. A freshly intensified RAM and component cost crisis has caused Valve to delay the Steam Machine’s release, with no exact date announced yet. And it can feel like the expected price of the box is skyrocketing upwards by the day.

That said, Valve has reportedly imported 50 tonnes of gaming hardware recently, which could represent somewhere in the ballpark of 20,000 Steam Machine units.

We'll have more news on the availability of the Steam Controller and Steam Machine as it drops.