Valve definitely dropped the ball on communication, but there is a real distinction between the lists.

The reservation list likely ties to guaranteed inventory. This would cover everything from warehouse stock to parts awaiting manufacturing and/or assembly, RAM being the probable bottleneck. As long as a full bill of materials is confirmed and finalized, Valve would consider those allocatable units.

The waitlist would then be all demand beyond that, and since Valve might not have RAM or storage obtained for them, those people might see a price increase.

If you want a less dark explanation, I think the toys are powered by both individual and collective imagination. Really popular toys like Buzz gain sentience immediately, because there are masses of children already thinking of them that way so much so that proximity isn’t needed. Non-toy items like Forky can gain toyhood and sentience from a concentrated dose of imagination. Most toys would be somewhere between those two extremes.

You could also go a step further and say collective imagination results in a lower quality sentience, explaining all the Buzzes, green aliens, etc. starting out less self-aware.

Not even that. “Abuse of genAI” is what ruined it. The tech itself is great.

I said it somewhere else, but I think Valve actually did factor in wishlist counts. The problem is in the percentage of those that convert to sales. For games, the median conversion rate is 10% to 20% of wishlists converting to sales within the first week. I expect the Steam Controller’s conversion rate was much higher.

Valve may have even tried anticipating this from Deck sales and still failed to account for the Deck conversion rate still being lower due to the greater price.