All hands on Steam Deck - Valve's handheld PC

I’m gonna play Elden Ring on my big TV anyway.

The appeal here for me are the hundreds of unfinished Steam games I’ve picked up in the last 18 years. And retro titles.

If no future AAA game ever runs well, I’ll be fine, as long as I can get stuff like Wildermyth and SMAC and Disco Elysium and Amiga games working.

Right there with you, that’s my planned use case. It’s never going to be my primary gaming device but I’ll likely get a lot more mileage out of it than I have my Switch.

I originally thought I would use Steam Deck for the indie backlog, but then I prefer playing one game at a time, so I just play something at home (Death Stranding, Horizon, now Archolos) and then play the same game when in office or commute seamlessly thanks to steam cloud saves. Meanwhile my indie backlog grows :)

I’m jealous. I seem to prefer playing all the games all the time. I love it when it happens, but I rarely settle into one game to see it through. I think the only games I finished over the past year were Nioh 2 and Sekiro.

You can play Spider-Man on the Steam Deck, and it’s apparently quite playable, if one is cool with 30fps and graphics that would look ugly on a bigger screen, but then, you don’t have a bigger screen, do you?

That’s clearly a sign that games are being made with enough slack towards lower spec machines that the Steam Deck can have a bright future ahead.

And from the Steam Deck calculator, something like only 15 days of orders have been processed from my queue (EU, 512GB), with other queues having similar values.

So, sure, not that many people are using the Steam Deck yet. Not that many people have got their Steam Deck, they haven’t even processed the first month of pre-orders. I’d wait until more people have them / people give up of ever getting one / enough time passes that other PC handhelds come out with much better tech.

Speaking of the queue, the “calculator” just updated. As of this morning the latest info was from 8/8 with nine days having been processed for my queue (US 512GB), now it’s up to 17 days 20 hours! I ordered 21 days in, so I’m hoping for an order confirmation in the next few days!

I just got my notification and I ordered on 8/6. Funny as I’m on vacation and my kid was just talking about the thing…boom, it pops up on my laptop. 256GB model

They are cranking these things out! Looks like I’ll be ordering mine soon. Much sooner than the October I was initially expecting.

Results:

It looks like you have a US 512GB reservation
You reserved your deck 22 days, 07 hours, 10 minutes and 00 seconds after pre-orders opened
17 days, 20 hours, 04 minutes and 59 seconds worth of pre-orders have been processed
You have 04 days, 11 hours, 05 minutes and 01 seconds worth of pre-orders to go until it is your turn (not real time)
You're 79.99 % of the way there!

…and five days later, it has supposedly shipped!

Awesome! Report back with impressions!

My reservation notification for the 256GB just arrived. Moment of truth re following my rational brain or my gadget brain.

My 512GB notification just arrived! Gadget Brain wins in 0:18 seconds into the first round by KO.

wait, so it shipped 5 days after your order? wow! I didn’t know the queue was moving so quickly.

It’s been 5 days since my notice…no shipped email yet…cmon, valve.

Edit: Missed ship notice. Shipped today…arrive Thursday.

It shipped five days after the notice/payment of the full cost. So I got the notification and made the payment on Monday, and it apparently shipped on Saturday evening. ETA is 48 hours from now, so shipping was ~4 days (including a Sunday).

Likewise! Paid in full 5 mins ago. I got an email reminding me credit card bill is due tomorrow 4 mins ago…haha Capital one is trolling me!

…and FedEx says they delivered it a day early! A wonderful surprise… Except that I was home all day, and they didn’t deliver anything to my house. Hopefully just a mix up on FedEx’s tracking info, but I don’t relish needed to go back to Valve and asking them to ship me another.

Sounds like typical FedEx to me. They’ve been atrocious the past few years, at least in my area.

Yep…same. Fedex says Thursday for my Deck…uh…doubt it.

Typical FedEx screw up.

Even though it explicitly has my address and name on the package, some yahoo scribbled my neighbor’s address on the box and they delivered it there. Idiots.

BUT: Steam Deck is booting up!