December 17 news, recently, Valve designer Greg Coomer said that all indications are that Valve can release Steam Deck in February next year.
Steam Deck was expected to ship in December, but it had to skip tickets until February next year due to a shortage of parts. Greg Coomer explains why Steam Deck keeps being delayed, mainly due to the lack of corresponding parts, with about 50 parts in a severe state of stock.
Greg Coomer also said:
We're not expecting steam deck to be a big success on day one, but rather that the number of players who own the handheld will continue to increase between 2022 and 2023, and if things go the way we imagine, millions of players will be able to use Steam Deck.
This shows that Valve has considerable confidence in the product internally, not only has high expectations for the sales volume of the product, but also guarantees a high supply. Valve Hardware Director Shreya Liu has many years of experience working with the supply chain, and she was responsible for the procurement management of Surface's display and touch parts at Microsoft, or could make corresponding reserves for the subsequent supply of this handheld.
On July 16, Valve officially released the handheld Steam Deck, which uses a 7-inch touch screen, a resolution of 1280 * 800, a maximum support of 60Hz refresh rate, support for 45W fast charging, priced from $399, the first batch of sales areas for the United States, Canada, the European Union and the United Kingdom, other regions will be open for purchase in 2022.
Battery performance may also be the key to affecting the experience of the whole machine, many similar products in order to maintain high power output, often only about 2 to 3 hours of game life, and the traditional handheld has a big gap. It's unclear how much Steam Deck has done with performance scheduling and endurance optimization, but according to the development team, it can play Portal 2 for five or six hours at 30 frames.
After the release of the aircraft, it will face direct competition with the Nintendo Switch. The latter currently starts at $299, and the Switch OLED model costs $349, and the Switch has a certain price advantage. However, the price of games on the Steam platform is very favorable when it is promoted. After the launch of the machine, it may bring a lot of impact to the Switch, or force Nintendo to launch better hardware products.