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Valve says the Steam Deck handheld PC gaming machine is on track to ship by the planned February 2022 release date.
In early November, the company announced the exciting on-the-go machine would miss the initially planned December 2021 launch by a couple of months.
Given one delay has often led to another – especially in the gaming realm – during the triple whammy of a pandemic, chip shortage and global shipping issues, Steam Deck fanciers will be glad to know there’ll be no further delays.
In a January Update posted on the Steam Community website, the company wrote: “First and foremost, we’re on track to ship Steam Deck on time. Global pandemic, supply issues, and shipping issues notwithstanding, it looks like we’ll be able to start getting these out the door by the end of February. You can view your estimated reservation availability window here, in case you’ve forgotten.”
In more good news, the company said it is seeing Dev units out to hundreds of developers, enabling them to test their titles for perfect compatibility before the device starts hitting customers’ doorsteps.
“It’s also important that we give developers the ability to test their games in order to get that nice green Verified check,” the company added, “so we’ve been sending developer kits out in quantity. We’ve been approving another wave of dev kits, and hundreds have been shipped out in the last month.”
The Steam Deck promises to do for portable PC gaming what the Nintendo Switch has achieved in the console realm. It’s more powerful than the Switch though, as it has the AMD Zen 2 CPU and an AMD RDNA 2 GPU with 16GB of RAM. There’s also a 7-inch LCD touchscreen display with a 12800×800 resolution and a 60Hz refresh rate. You can also get upto 512GB of built in storage, which can be expanded via microSD.
Starting price is £349 / $399 (64GB), but that runs up to £569 / $649 for the 512GB model. You’ll get your games via the Steam Store and, naturally, any you’ve already bought will be waiting for you.
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