The release of the much anticipated gaming handheld Steam Deck, which is actually planned for the end of 2021, will be postponed to February 2022. Valve has this in an official release on Steampowered.com announced.
Unsurprisingly, Valve cites supply difficulties as the reason for the shortage of technical components that has persisted since the end of 2020. According to the announcement, the new release date is based on current estimates, so it should not be regarded as set in stone.
What happens to reservations for the Steam Deck that have already been made?
In essence, all planned deliveries should be postponed by the same period. So if you are in the first place in the registration queue, you will still be one of the first to receive the new gaming handheld, only at a later point in time than originally planned.
Valve works at the same time according to its own information working flat out to adjust the reservation dates based on the new schedule
. More detailed information on this should follow, although on the already known store website https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck is referred.
Valve does not specify which components exactly lead to the delivery problems. The built-in hardware includes an AMD CPU based on Zen-2 with four cores and an AMD graphics unit based on RDNA-2 with a clock rate of up to 1.6 gigahertz (see also our article Specs compared to PC hardware, Nintendo Switch, PS5 and Xbox Series X
).
Our Steam Deck info hub provides all the important information at a glance. You can also find out what our experts think of the upcoming gaming handheld in the following article:
more on the subject
Steam deck: top or flop? That’s what our experts say
Can Valve keep the new release date?
That can only be speculated, but it seems quite plausible to us that only
the current difficult supply situation stands in the way of a release and not internal development problems with the new gaming handheld.
The various hands-on reports, which make the Steam Deck look very advanced, also contribute to this. The same applies to valves detailed look inside the steam deck
Link to YouTube content
After all, the shift gives Valve the opportunity to launch the newly launched Deck Verified
-Program to advance, which should provide more information about the compatibility of Steam games with the gaming handheld.
How do you assess the situation? Will we have to wait longer than currently indicated for the Steam Deck or will it really come in February 2022? And if you have pre-ordered a model, when is your delivery planned according to the current status? Feel free to write it in the comments!