There was a full news cycle of tech folks talking about how "they are so in demand, they sold out instantly." Build the hype with free press.

Valve has enough experience with this to know exactly what they were doing.

I think they wanted to leave a bunch of scalpers as bag holders. It's kinda genius. Let the scalpers go crazy buying a shitload of controllers, then later let actual consumers buy and reserve. So actual players have a reason NOT to buy from the inflated scalpers, and the scalpers are left with a bunch of controllers they can't sell because everyone is buying them at fair price.

And the scalpers will have a hard time buying up the second stock, because many of them likely already blew a lot of money the first time, and the second time will require a lot of bottery that will be even more expensive to try and pull off.

If I remember correctly they did setup a similar reservation system for the Steamdeck when it came out?