Steam Deck and Docking Station now in-stock and available!
EDIT: It is official!
We're happy to announce that with today’s batch of order emails, we have completed our reservation queue. We are now in-stock and Steam Deck is available for purchase!
The Docking Station is available for purchase now! Learn more about it here, or order one here.
Previous post:
I wanted to give everyone here a heads' up that it seems like Valve is through most of its preorders for the Steam Deck, so the delay between reserving one and receiving a confirmation is essentially negligible at this point (unlike the months-long waits of the past).
Anecdotally: my husband put in a reservation on Sunday and received confirmation on Monday, the next day (US 512GB model).
Less anecdotally: /r/steamdeck is unofficially confirming this for all queues except the EU 64GB model.
If you've been waiting out the wait time for a Steam Deck, it looks like your time has come! You should be able to get one almost ASAP moving forward.
Also, if you're on the fence about it, I cannot recommend it enough. I absolutely love mine.
Every time I see a Steam Deck mention I think "Maybe it's available now" only to be met with
This item is not available for reservation in your country.Welp, back to waiting until 2025.
I heard a rumour that Australia is being cut out because of some videogame VAT thing that they're trying to get around with only selling software vs something that they would definitely need to pay up if they sold hardware, but I know know details and can offer no credible source.
I guess a question would be if you somehow imported one, would it even work or is the Steamdeck itself geolocked as well?
I doubt it's geolocked, since it's supposed to be a portable system, and Valve has been pretty hands off with locking it down. Even if it was, I'm sure that if you're allowed to run emulators for old games, you can run a program to circumvent it.
As @Liru mentioned it's very unlikely to come with any restrictions. As far as I'm aware it's a small but powerful Linux machine that you can do anything you want with. For me it's more about excessive costs of importing plus the risk of having to use the warranty.
I believe I've heard of people doing exactly that, having it shipped to them from a supported country, but haven't heard of any issues with that so I'd be surprised to find a region lock.
I've definitely thought about it recently, but I keep reminding myself I need to save for the PS VR2 coming early next year.
Confirmation isn’t the same as shipping though, right?
EDIT: Old news below! It’s now available for immediate purchase.
The process currently is:
Reservation ($5 deposit)
Confirmation (Valve confirms they have a Deck for you, and you actually follow through with the purchase)
Shipping (usually happens a few days after you’ve made your purchase)
My husband’s path has been:
Reservation: Sunday
Confirmation: Monday
Shipping: Wednesday
Expected Arrival: Friday
Gotcha. I wasn’t sure if that was immediate shipping quite yet. I may have to finally order one.
I want to like it, because I want to support spreading more Linux across the world. However, I don't consider myself part of the target market. I've never been much of a portable device gamer, playing almost exclusively on computer or console. I've never done any serious gaming on a phone.
I can't say I was much of a portable device gamer. I had an original Gameboy way back in the day and played a few games on Gameboy Color and Gamegear owned by friends since then, never been much of a mobile gamer (just casual or turn based games) and absolutely nothing that requires a controller or even two handed onscreen controls.
Being that consoles are expensive, locked down, less capable computers, I long ago switched to almost exclusively PC gaming. The consoles I did have were largely from my wife's collection and all of those were liquidated earlier this year in preparation for the Steamdeck as she adopted my stance against consoles for newer generations (the Switch being the exception as she's an Animal Crossing and Splatoon fan) so we didn't have anything newer than PS3 (excluding Switch). Which leads to the Steamdeck being a single device replacement for all of the consoles we had (including Switch) and somewhere that I can play games that work well with a controller and underutilize the capabilities of the gaming PC I use day to day.
It's nice that it's portable, but I don't really intend on taking it anywhere extreme. I'm not the sort to bring it when I'm visiting someone as I'm typically there to spend time with them, not to spend time in their residence looking at a screen. Thus far, for the two weeks I've owned mine, I've used it to play games in my living room on the couch and outside in my wife's hammock instead of staying in my office even longer each day that I feel like playing games.
For me it's not really a "portable gaming device" as much as it's all pre-PS4 consoles (plus Switch) and a medium powered gaming PC that I'm not required to be in one place to use. A compact gaming laptop for someone with zero need or desire for a laptop.
Once you get over the cost of the machine itself (which really isn't that bad for the Steam Deck, IMHO), PC gaming can easily be drammatically cheaper than console gaming if you're patient enough. Console gaming has a lot of forces to keep the price of games high, wheras PC gaming has moved to all-digital on an open market, so things frequently go on crazy sales. Right now one of my favorite series has the entire collection currently selling for $5.99 - 80% off it's already low regular price of $29.99.
No argument there. I purchased the 512gb Steamdeck and it was still less than the new GPU that just arrived for my PC.
PC game sales happen near constantly and there are more games than you could ever play so I never feel pressure to buy on release day, a complaint that my wife has for her Switch is that games are nearly never on sale and if so only drop $10-15 from the standard $60 per game. On the flipside of that, she typically has a physical copy that can be resold to recoup about 20-25% of that cost which hasn't been all that possible in PC gaming for ages.
And while PC gaming rigs can be extremely expensive, a lot of that is pressure from enthusiast niche for best of the best. PCPartPicker has a build for the price of a current gen console and a couple of games ($650) that'll run just about anything you can throw at it 1080P@60fps. To counter, the entry level Steamdeck is $400, the price of a digital only PS5.
That's fair, and I totally get the appeal or the use cases. In my case, though, one thing I strive for in gaming is a full-blown visual experience, with a large monitor. I also try to crank up graphics settings as high as they can go until I hit my threshold for acceptable frames per second. So, having something portable where the screen is small is too much of a tradeoff for me.
That said, I see that they'll soon be selling a Dock(ing Station) https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeckdock which will let you connect to a TV or monitor. That might be a game changer (pun half intended).
I put in my reservation near the beginning of August, and received confirmation yesterday (Tuesday). What is this magic he possesses?
His uncle works at Nintendo. 😆
In all seriousness -- I have no idea? I feel bad that yours took so long.
I was thinking about getting one for my sister because she's not big on gaming on computers (she's got a bad back so sitting for long periods is very uncomfortable for her).
Unfortunately I'm about to take a pre-planned and long overdue vacation and the business I'm working for is doing very poorly, so this is the absolutely worst time to be spending money. Also the only games she tends to play on computers are not supported on Steam Deck, and while they might work, the experience wouldn't be too great on a relatively small screen.
I'm going to need a portable gaming device (lest I go insane) in the not too far future and this seems like a far better option than a gaming laptop. However unfortunately it's still not available in Australia.. (and well, a lot of the world)
Seriously considering importing one from the US. Guessing I would probably need a VPN and to change my store region at the least though? If anyone has done this, could they please lmk how they did it?
Going to feel very stupid if I do all that and an Australian release is announced soon!