Steam handheld will be released early next year

 

According to news on December 17, Valve designer Greg Coomer recently said that all signs indicate that Valve can release Steam Deck in February next year.

Steam Deck was expected to ship in December, but due to a shortage of parts, it had to skip the ticket to February next year. Greg Coomer explained the reasons for the continuous delay of Steam Deck, mainly because of the lack of corresponding parts, and about 50 parts are in a severely out of stock state.

Greg Coomer also stated:

We did not expect Steam Deck to be a big success on the first day, but hope that the number of players with this handheld will continue to increase from 2022 to 2023. If things develop in the direction we imagined, there will be counts. Millions of players can use Steam Deck.

This shows that Valve is quite confident in this product internally, not only has higher expectations for product sales, but also can guarantee a higher supply. Valve hardware director Shreya Liu has many years of experience in dealing with the supply chain. She was responsible for the procurement management of Surface display and touch parts at Microsoft, and may be able to make corresponding reserves for the follow-up supply of this handheld.

On July 16, Valve officially released the handheld Steam Deck, which uses a 7-inch touch screen with a resolution of 1280*800, supports a maximum refresh rate of 60Hz, supports 45W fast charging, and starts at $399. The first wholesale sales area is The United States, Canada, the European Union and the United Kingdom, and other regions will be open for purchase in 2022.

Battery performance may also be the key to the overall experience. To maintain high power output, many similar products often only have about 2 to 3 hours of game life, which is not a small gap with traditional handhelds. It is not clear how much work Steam Deck has done on performance scheduling and battery life optimization. According to the development team, you can play “Portal 2” for five or six hours at 30 frames.

After the machine is released, it will face the competition with Nintendo Switch. The current price of the latter starts at US$299, and the price of the Switch OLED model is US$349. The Switch has a certain price advantage. However, for games on the Steam platform, the price at the time of promotion is very favorable. After the launch of this machine, it may bring a big impact to the Switch, or force Nintendo to launch better hardware products.