- It has features others do not and extra hardware others do not. That costs more.
- Tarrifs, the stupid Iran war and the AI price boom has made new items expensive where as existing items still have stock at old prices for now but will go up. For example new smart phones are between 50 and 100 percent more expensive than the previous years version.
I do have to complain about the price: Not that it’s $99 USD, but that it’s $149 CAD and not $136 CAD. That’s an extra $14 over FX for what exactly? I still have to pay the shipping… kinda shitty of Valve there.
I don’t mind this for $136 CAD because I have a pile of 2 broken PS5 controllers ($120 wasted — though now the price is $104 each so I guess it’s a $210 comparable) and a pile of dead Joy Cons, and frankly, controllers from the big companies are steaming piles of e-waste.
With the fancy quantum magnet sticks and having fancy magnet triggers, and having a bluetooth pairing/switching process that isn’t archaic, this feels like it’s worth buying. If only you could buy more pucks, because I would want one for my gaming computer and one for my partner’s computer given how easy pairing is (right now my partner uses a Nintendo Pro controller with cable, because bluetooth on that thing is weird — even some linux distros don’t pair with it still).
Import fees maybe? Tariffs on products from the US?