The ongoing chip shortage continues to affect the availability of products across silicon-dependent industries, with the most recent example being Nvidia’s RTX 2060 12GB GPU. Valve’s Steam Deck also fell prey to the shortage earlier this year, forcing the company to delay the launch of its handheld gaming PC by three months. However, in a recent interview with PC Gamer, Valve has reassuringly said that its portable Steam machine will make its February release date.
Valve designer Greg Coomer says that the company is “still bummed that we had to move from end of this year to beginning of next. But yeah, all the signs are pointing to us being able to ship in February”.
Tragically, Valve were close to reaching a point where it wouldn’t have to delay the Steam Deck, but were unable to secure around 50 components in the category of “microchip type ICs” from multiple manufacturing partners. Since then, however, members of the Steam Deck team have been devoted to ensure said parts will show up in time.
It’s clear that Valve is doing all it can to make sure the Steam Deck is a success. In addition to testing every game available on Steam, the company has recently released patches for its own games that are undoubtedly to help with Steam Deck compatibility.
While we haven’t had eyes on final retail units, we do know what the Steam Deck’s carrying case selection and packaging (complete with Portal references) will look like. We’ve also learned how much space the device’s operating system will ask from your storage device, and it’s surprisingly not much at all!