Valve Has Some Good News For Steam Deck Buyers
High demand for the Steam Deck handheld gaming console combined with ongoing supply issues has left many consumers waiting for their chance to purchase the device. Valve clarified things back in March, but the availability problems haven't really been addressed beyond that, leaving consumers to settle with the promise that the console's production would be ramped up and that invites would eventually roll their way. Fast forward to June, and Valve has now promised that it is going to double the rate at which the Steam Deck is being shipped to gamers who are still waiting anxiously for it (via Twitter).
"Production has picked up, and after today we'll be shipping more than double the number of Steam Decks every week," the official Steam Deck account said in a tweet published on June 27. Lawrence Yang, a designer at Valve, clarified in the replies that the weekly shipping output is going up from X to 2X, but didn't provide a number. As you may recall, a healthy number of potential buyers are still awaiting the invites that will allow them to buy the console after having registered their interest weeks or months ago.
As of now, shipment estimates for users who reserved a unit are running all the way into the third quarter of 2022. Valve says the first batch of emails with the purchase link for Steam Deck units earmarked for the Q3 shipment period will start rolling out on June 30. Needless to say, keep an eye on your inbox if you've been eyeing the handheld console, which has drawn a mixed response over its compelling premise and hardware issues.
The good, bad, and ugly for Steam Deck moving ahead
If you somehow miss the email on the day it finally lands in your inbox, Valve will give you a grace period of a few days to complete the purchase before the window closes and a fresh reservation pushes you further down the waitlist. That aside, there's still some bad news in the pipeline. As Valve moves ahead with production at full steam, the official Steam Deck Docking Station was delayed earlier this month, with the company citing a shortage of parts and COVID-related logistics issues as the reason.
Interestingly, it appears Valve rivals that have been in the handheld PC game for a while now are planning to eat into the Steam Deck's popularity as it continues to grapple with the supply shortage. In March this year, GPD launched the Win Max 2, a handheld gaming PC that comes armed with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800U APU and a Radeon 680M GPU based on the RDNA 2 architecture.
In May, Aya lifted the covers from Neo 2, touted to be the world's first handheld gaming PC based on AMD's 6800U chip. Going by the numbers, the Radeon 680M can reportedly push roughly 3.4 TFLOPs of graphics performance, which would put it far ahead of the Steam Deck's 1.6 TFLOPs range. However, YouTuber "Moore's Law Is Dead" claims that Valve plans to use AMD's upcoming Phoenix chip based on the Zen 4 CPU cores and the RDNA3 architecture for the second-generation Deck 2.