Earlier today Valve announced that the company will start sending out order emails to all the Steam Deck reservation holders. If you’re in the queue, you might expect the email soon, with a 72 hour purchase window to get your sample. Those who don’t complete the purchase within that time-frame will have their order moved to the next person.
The first consignment reserved for customers will be shipping at the end of February, while review units for media partners will be released a few weeks earlier, with the embargo date being the 25th of February.
Valve’s Answer to Nintendo’s Switch and Mobile Gaming
The Steam Deck is essentially a portable gaming PC running Linux, promising a similar experience to Nintendo’s line-up of consoles, with Valve’s own twist on it.
The handheld has the possibility of running the whole Steam Library with hundreds of thousands of games, but it’s still not there yet. Due to optimization requirements we’ll only get a handful at launch, with more being promised later this year.
Specification-wise, the Steam Deck can compete with most mid-tiered gaming laptops out there. The console is sporting a four-core Zen 2 CPU paired with an RDNA 2-based GPU and 16GB of fast LPDDR5 memory.
Three storage options will be available; the affordable 64 GB version with eMMC memory set at $399, and the faster 256 GB and 512 GB models with NVMe SSDs, set at $529 and $649 respectively. Expansion through SD Cards and external storage will be supported as well.
Although promised in late 2021, Valve wasn’t immune to the global chip shortage and various supply chain issues that currently plaque the industry. Nevertheless, it seems like the status normalized, and the company is still taking in new reservations.
If you missed the first window, you can still enter this round for $5. Arm yourself with patience though, since the current order page states that you’ll get your sample sometimes “after Q2 2022”.
Source: https://store.steampowered.com/
Editor’s note: Dear visitor, you’re currently looking at an outdated esports news article from 2022, for the latest happenings around Valve’s handheld console, kindly visit the main tag under this link: Steam Deck News.