I have seen this mentioned in comments elsewhere but I haven't seen anyone make an actual post about it. I thought it was odd when I didn't get charged any tax on my purchase yesterday, so I have been checking to see if others noticed.
Through reading various comments over the past 24 hours, I feel confident the mistake was listing the controller as a digital good/software download. Everyone who says they weren't charged taxes lives in states where digital games aren't taxed like California, Arkansas (which taxes some digital goods, but not games), and Missouri.
Meanwhile, I've confirmed that people in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania were charged tax, which makes sense because those states tax digital downloads just like physical hardware. Originally I was confused by someone in Georgia paying tax, but through some research I found out that Georgia updated their laws in 2024 to tax digital game purchases.
This seems like a pretty big mistake on Valve's part. Hopefully, it doesn't result in orders being cancelled, but it might explain why some of us got a "stealth discount."
If you live in a state like California and were charged tax, please share that here and what time you bought it. It's possible they fixed it at some point yesterday.
Edit May 5th 5:50est : My order just got updated to "Packaged Items" so for anyone who was worried this may affect their order it looks like you don't have to worry about that.
Edit 2: I was right, someone posted the listing change on SteamDB in the comments. Shortly after my first post pointing out the error they updated the listing from Game to Hardware. https://steamdb.info/app/4165870/history/
Edit 3: Someone reached out to support and they confirmed that it was a mistake but that we wouldn't be charged after the fact to correct the mistake. https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamController/comments/1t3o8i7/comment/ok5mhjt/?context=1