Valve's handheld PC is enjoying great popularity, with demand far outstripping supply – although the Steam Deck has been shipping for four months now. On the one hand, the manufacturer is now announcing that it will process the first orders for the third quarter this week and will have doubled production.
Processing of Q3 -Reservations coming up
All those interested parties to whom Valve promised delivery in the second quarter of 2022 at the time of pre-ordering their Steam Deck are said to have been asked by email to complete their order. Later this week, on June 30, Valve wants to continue with the deliveries planned for the third quarter. As usual, notified pre-orderers have three days to complete the transaction and can then expect to receive a console in the following days. However, Valve points out that an order is still possible for a short time after the 72 hours have passed, provided that those affected contact support.
Weekly shipments are set to double
The same applies to all of this: Whoever pre-ordered first should also be given a Steam Deck first. Valve is currently predicting that new customers will have to wait until at least October 2022, regardless of which of the three variants is pre-ordered. However, it could soon be faster, as the manufacturer announced via Twitter: From now on, twice as many Steam Decks will be delivered each week as in the previous weeks.
Hello! Some great news on the production front. We just sent the last batch of Q2 emails, and we'll start sending Q3 reservation emails on the 30th.
Production has picked up, and after today we'll be shipping more than double the number of Steam Decks every week! pic.twitter.com/kAHE0zRrV7— Steam Deck (@OnDeck) June 27, 2022
The global chip crisis, supply chain problems and lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are widely believed to be behind the ongoing scarcity. The Steam Deck is in the best of company, even the PlayStation 5, which was released in November 2020, is still hardly available.
No docking station and No longer SSDs please
There is no further information about the planned docking station, which Valve only had to postpone indefinitely at the beginning of the month. The manufacturer recently warned against installing longer M.2 SSDs in the Steam Deck, which is not intended for this purpose. In principle, such storage media fit into the handheld console, but there are risks involved.