Steam Deck delay pushes the initial ship date to February 2022

A two-month shipping delay for Steam Deck orders across the board

It’s been a rough year for getting new and even old hardware out the door, and those supply-chain struggles extend to Valve, too. The company has been forced to push back the launch of the Steam Deck until February 2022 due to “material shortages.”

In a statement today, Valve said that customers who already have an order lined up for December can now expect their Steam Deck to ship in February. In other words, that is “the new start date of the reservation queue,” so everyone who has the handheld gaming system reserved will “keep their place in line but dates will shift back accordingly.”

“We’ll continue working to improve reservation dates based on the new timeline, and will keep folks updated as we go,” Valve said. You can see your personal ETA on this page.

“We’re sorry about this—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 explained.

It hurts to see a holiday product slip into the new year, but at the same time, two months isn’t too bad, and at least with a reservation queue, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a shame to come so close and see more games running on the Steam Deck only for the rug to be pulled out from under us right before launch. At least they were transparent.

I imagine plenty of you tempered your expectations, so this might come as little to no surprise. Hopefully the extra time here can bolster the Steam Deck’s software support.

The idea of a Valve-backed handheld PC with more or less full support for my ridiculous, padded-out Steam library is enticing — but I’m okay waiting until some of the potential kinks are worked out. Anyone else skipping the first model (for the time being)?