Steam Deck Delayed to February 2022

News
By Andrew E. Freedman
published

Due to global supply chain issues

Steam Deck
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Valve has notified customers that it is delaying the Steam Deck for two months, pushing it to February 2022.

"We're sorry about this," Valve wrote in emails to customers and on its blog. "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."

The company said reservation updates would be updated soon. Users can check at https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck.

"All reservation holders will keep their place in line, with dates shifting back accordingly," Steam wrote in an emailed statement.

My pre-order, originally set for this December, now reads Q1 2022. Editor Michelle Ehrhardt, who had a Q1 2022 release date, saw her pre-order pushed back to Q2 2022.

We last saw the Steam Deck in August, during a hands-on with early hardware. We left with bullish impressions regarding the comfort and gaming at low-level settings. We still had questions about the dock, and we'd love to learn more about it running Windows.

In September, Valve hit a milestone, sending near-final hardware to developers to see how their games run. It also launched its @OnDeck Twitter account showing those games running, building hype for the device.

A Steamworks virtual conference regarding the Steam Deck and the AMD Van Gogh APU powering it is scheduled for November 12. The company is also working on its Proton layer to make more games compatible with its Linux-based SteamOS. Recently, Easy Anti-Cheat was updated to support the Steam, Deck and its Proton emulation layer.

The company has also detailed how to tear down the Steam Deck and replace the SSD and thumbsticks, though it suggests you don't do it yourself.

Valve was rapidly approaching the December release date prior to this announcement, so it's unclear what further information the company may release between now and February.

Andrew E. Freedman

Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and Mastodon @FreedmanAE.mastodon.social.

2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • maik80
    The world's production chain cannot recover from covid in a short time. it will take years
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    maik80 said:
    The world's production chain cannot recover from covid in a short time. it will take years
    This is mainly just the excuse companies use for product delays now, so that they can save face by blaming their deficiencies on something supposedly outside of their control. : P

    The Steam Deck was just announced a few months ago, and Valve should have had a reasonably good idea by that point how production and shipments were going. If they thought there was any possibility that the device wouldn't start shipping by December, then they should have announced a more conservative launch date. But of course, they wanted to get a rush of people to preorder, expecting their device to arrive by Christmas. So, much like your typical Early Access title, they gave it an unrealistically optimistic launch date to lock in sales.

    It's also possible that things simply are not ready yet on the software side of things. The launch of Valve's previously failed Steam Machine ecosystem was pushed back more than a year, apparently due to mixed feedback about their prior version of SteamOS. Valve wants the SteamOS experience to be a lot smoother this time around, and are banking on the Proton compatibility layer to make that happen, but there are still a lot of games that don't work perfectly under Proton. Proton allows Windows games to run on Linux, but last I heard, not much more than half of games will run properly out-of-the box on Proton, and many won't run at all. And Valve is supposedly going through and checking all games to determine their level of compatibility, which is undoubtedly a large effort in itself. So it could be that the hardware is technically ready and in their hands, but the software still needs work.
    Reply