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Steam Deck: can Valve’s portable PC succeed where Steam Machines failed?

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The timing could hardly have been better. A little over a week after the underwhelming announcement of Nintendo’s new OLED Switch model (better screen, bigger stand, and, well, that’s your lot), along came Steam Deck – a significantly more powerful handheld console a few wags determined was the real Switch Pro. The process for reserving units may have turned into a bit of a mess, with some Steam users told their accounts were too new (did the past decade or so really mean that little, Valve?) while others were informed they’d made too many purchases before their deposit had been taken. Yet these obvious signs of servers being overrun would probably have been music to the platform holder’s ears: a leak of the queue sizes suggested 100,000 reservations were made in about two hours.

Not a bad start, then, though Valve’s Steam account stipulations that were intended to stop scalpers had little effect, with eBay listings for Steam Deck preorders set at extortionate prices cropping up almost immediately afterward. More problems soon emerged: the first batch of preorders may be set to arrive with players in the first quarter of next year, but those for the mid-range 256GB model and high-end 512GB unit won’t be with players until Q2 and Q3 respectively.