Valve announces that the launch of Steam Deck will be delayed by two months
Sony PS5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X/S have been launched, but due to the global chip shortage this year, players have not been able to buy these two major consoles, and other game consoles are equally difficult to produce. Valve announced their first handheld Steam Deck this year. It was originally scheduled to ship in December this year, but now it has to announce an extension.
Valve explained in its official announcement:
The launch of Steam Deck will be delayed by two months. We’re sorry about this—we did our best to work around the global supply chain issues, but due to material shortages, components aren’t reaching our manufacturing facilities in time for us to meet our initial launch dates.Based on our updated build estimates, Steam Deck will start shipping to customers February 2022. This will be the new start date of the reservation queue—all reservation holders keep their place in line but dates will shift back accordingly. Reservation date estimates will be updated shortly after this announcement.
As the first handheld game console based on PC hardware architecture produced by a major manufacturer, Steam Deck is a product category that was originally niche and brought to the masses of gamers. It is different from similar products such as GPD Win 3, AYA, and OneXPlayer that are already on the market today. All use CPUs from thin and light notebooks. Steam Deck chose to cooperate with AMD to customize an APU, which is more in line with the needs of handhelds in terms of power consumption and performance. Coupled with Valve’s own SteamOS 3.0 based on the Arch kernel, coupled with a huge Steam game library, there is indeed a more complete ecology.
