The Steam Controller Purchase Conundrum
On the Psychology of Broken Checkouts
For many, buying the new Steam Controller, or trying to, wasn’t a great experience. That includes myself as documented here. But is there something that Valve could, or even would want to, improve? Let’s investigate this a little!
The Struggle
I was ready when the store page unlocked and the new Steam Controller became available for purchase on May 4th. I quickly filled out the delivery address, the payment details and repeatedly received the following response:
There seems to have been an error initializing or updating your transaction. Please wait a minute and try again or contact support for assistance.
Soon, I did try concurrently with the Steam Client (Linux), my standalone browser (Firefox) and the Steam Mobile App (iOS). Repeating attempts roughly every 10-60 seconds with no success
At times, I restarted the whole process fresh from the shopping cart; no luck either. Along, the shipping estimate increased from 3-5 days to 6-10 days. Not too long later, it would be out-of-stock. Sooner than Valve had anticipated.
The Break
Luckily, I looked at a few posts by other people in between attempts, to see if they had a similar experience; and sure they did. Then I came across a commenter stating that they spammed the buy button rapidly with ~40 clicks and succeeded.
So I tried the same. After ~20 repeated clicks, I was past the error message and could successfully finalize my purchase. Since I wanted to purchase a second unit with another shipping address, I repeated the recommendation. It worked again!
The Resolution
That left me with two thoughts:
Should I attempt the spamming approach again on the day(s) the Steam Machine and Steam Frame will launch?
Should Valve take (more) measures to reduce the store transaction problems under stress?
Both seemed worth sharing. The first to help others, the second to help myself organize my thoughts and as a foundation for others to add their perspectives.
First off, I wonder if it’s a purely technical issue, rather than (at least partially) a motivational one.
My coder brain went quickly with the first. I asked myself whether something like a rate limit per active buyer could help? Of course with a warning message appearing at the half mark before eventually limiting an account’s ability to purchase for a brief duration. Technically, I assume there are client side (cookie) and server-side (connection / IP) parts to the solution. The smart people at Valve could surely implement such a feature without too much hassle. Or am I vastly underestimating the effort since I never did it myself?
Then my designer brain took over and explored motivational reasoning: Is such a solution even in Valve’s best interest? A couple of arguments against that I can think of that are:
Maybe a rate limit would prevent purchases from bots (most probably scalpers) and even a few legit buyers. Resulting in less sales.
Maybe some customers would ignore the rate limit warning and/or be more frustrated compared to the transaction error.
Maybe psychological investment increases with multiple purchase attempts, making the item appear more valuable.
Maybe the perception of scarcity makes the item seem even more valuable.
Maybe it’s a combination of these factors that outweighs the benefits of a potential solution (like a rate limit), which itself comes with an implementation cost?
Or perhaps the issues were only local (e.g. Europe only), a faster internet connection might have helped (I was on a stable but relatively slow Wi-Fi), and/or something completely different?
It would also be interesting to know whether other Steam purchases were affected as well, or it was limited to carts with the Steam Controller in it?