It’s finally happening! Valve is officially launching its highly-awaited Steam Deck on February 25. Valve said it will send out the first batch of order emails to those with reservations as early as 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. ET) the day of. The purchase emails are going to be sent out in the order that the reservations were made. So if you were one of the ones to jump on those reservations back in July, it’ll be like Christmas morning in February.
Once you have the email, Valve is going to give you three days to pull the trigger on purchasing the Steam Deck or not. After that, your slot gets passed on to the next willing soul in line. And if you don’t get that golden ticket email on February 25, you’ll have to keep waiting as Valve is planning to put out new order email batches on a weekly basis.
The first Steam Decks units are going to be shipped out starting February 28, but Valve is planning to send out press units to be reviewed soon. Valve also teased that there’ll be some preview coverage and impressions before the press embargo on the Steam Deck lifts on February 25.
Three options —
In its announcement, Valve reminded us that we can only order the Steam Deck model that we reserved. In other words, you can’t switch between the three options if you, for example, initially reserved the 64 GB option with eMMC storage but have since decided you want an SSD for all the games you’re going to play on that bad boy.
As a refresher, the Steam Deck comes in three options. The most basic 64 GB option has eMMC storage and comes in at $399. The middle ground option at $529 is a 256 GB Steam Deck that comes with SSD storage and an exclusive Steam Community profile bundle. Finally, the most expensive option at $649 gives you a device with a 512GB SSD, anti-glare etched glass, an exclusive carrying case, an exclusive virtual keyboard theme as well as the exclusive Steam Community profile bundle.
Six months later —
Just in case you haven’t been following the entire saga that is the wait for Steam Deck, Valve announced its portable gaming device in July, opening up reservations shortly after. The initial ship date was planned for December, but had to be delayed to February due to the “global supply chain issues” that we’re still seeing right now. With the new ship date pushed back to February 2022, Valve later came out and confirmed the February ship date, further detailing that it would be at the end of the month.
So here we are now, just barely a month away from the actual release date of February 25. In the meantime, the company said it’s working on some “last few loose ends” and “some rough edges” before we get our hands on the Steam Deck.
