Valve is increasing Steam Deck shipments this quarter

[Shawn Knight]

Recap: Valve's Steam Deck launched at the end of February to much fanfare. Unfortunately for prospective buyers, the company accumulated a significant backlog of reservations in the lead up due in part to global component shortages and supply chain woes stemming from the pandemic.

Good news came down the pipe this week as Valve said it recently sent out the first batch of order e-mails to Q2 reservation holders. Better yet, Valve is ramping up Steam Deck shipments and will be sending more order availability e-mails each week – up to two waves per week at times.

Welcome to Q2! We've just sent out the first set of order emails to Q2 reservers (in order of reservation time). Starting today we're ramping up Steam Deck shipments, and will be sending more order availability emails every week. Sometimes even twice a week! pic.twitter.com/54TAoCQXfd

— Steam Deck (@OnDeck) April 4, 2022

No additional specifics were provided.

A quick check of the Steam Deck product page indicates new order expected availability has slipped to October 2022 or later. That means if you reserve a place in line today, you won't have the opportunity to place an order until October 2022 or later at the earliest.

It's wild to think of shopping for the holidays in April, but here we are.

There are ways to get your hands on a Steam Deck sooner, but it'll cost you. Looking at recently sold Steam Decks on eBay, in-hand units from reputable sellers (not obvious spam accounts) in the US start around $1,000 and scale up from there depending on the hardware configuration. For comparison, the entry-level Steam Deck with 64GB of eMMC retails for $399 directly from Valve.

Have you had a chance to try out the Steam Deck yet? If so, does it live up to your expectations for a portable PC gaming machine?

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/94062-valve-increasing-steam-deck-shipments-quarter.html

 

[Dimitriid]

Still no word on general availability *without* a reservation system or outside of the very limited number of countries that can even enter said reservation system.

So I still maintain that for as long as they keep up this "Reserve for the privilege of giving us money for a product" system, the price tags are unrealistic: Valve didn't really have to subsidize the cost of the handhelds and sell them at a lost they can avoid a ton of overhead by basically building to order: no speculation or slow moving cycles and more importantly, no revenue share with more widely available sales channels so even with thin margins it's 100% profit for them so margin doesn't needs to be as wide and henceforth, you can maintain your claims of "Only 399!" if you are literally not making it available for people except months to years down the line at the best of cases.

So tl;dr I just don't think saying their console is so much cheaper than competitors is fair at this point under this sales strategy: if availability is not there then price claims are meaningless: we've learned that from GPUs but because not it's Valve *now* people are willing to forget all those lessons and not look at the *actual* street price which should be resellers and scalpers on ebay. That's how much it *actually* cost if you consider the actual demand and not the intentionally constrained and controlled one created by Valve.

 

[VaRmeNsI]

Still no word on general availability *without* a reservation system or outside of the very limited number of countries that can even enter said reservation system.

So I still maintain that for as long as they keep up this "Reserve for the privilege of giving us money for a product" system, the price tags are unrealistic: Valve didn't really have to subsidize the cost of the handhelds and sell them at a lost they can avoid a ton of overhead by basically building to order: no speculation or slow moving cycles and more importantly, no revenue share with more widely available sales channels so even with thin margins it's 100% profit for them so margin doesn't needs to be as wide and henceforth, you can maintain your claims of "Only 399!" if you are literally not making it available for people except months to years down the line at the best of cases.

So tl;dr I just don't think saying their console is so much cheaper than competitors is fair at this point under this sales strategy: if availability is not there then price claims are meaningless: we've learned that from GPUs but because not it's Valve *now* people are willing to forget all those lessons and not look at the *actual* street price which should be resellers and scalpers on ebay. That's how much it *actually* cost if you consider the actual demand and not the intentionally constrained and controlled one created by Valve.

Why would you prioritize selling a device you need to make $ back on via games, in poor countries where people can't afford them?

 

[dangh]

Can't wait, my order should be ready in couple of weeks.

 

[Prrredictable]

Still no word on general availability *without* a reservation system or outside of the very limited number of countries that can even enter said reservation system.

So I still maintain that for as long as they keep up this "Reserve for the privilege of giving us money for a product" system, the price tags are unrealistic: Valve didn't really have to subsidize the cost of the handhelds and sell them at a lost they can avoid a ton of overhead by basically building to order: no speculation or slow moving cycles and more importantly, no revenue share with more widely available sales channels so even with thin margins it's 100% profit for them so margin doesn't needs to be as wide and henceforth, you can maintain your claims of "Only 399!" if you are literally not making it available for people except months to years down the line at the best of cases.

So tl;dr I just don't think saying their console is so much cheaper than competitors is fair at this point under this sales strategy: if availability is not there then price claims are meaningless: we've learned that from GPUs but because not it's Valve *now* people are willing to forget all those lessons and not look at the *actual* street price which should be resellers and scalpers on ebay. That's how much it *actually* cost if you consider the actual demand and not the intentionally constrained and controlled one created by Valve.

No offense, honestly, but I don't think you have any clue what you're talking about.

 

[Dimitriid]

No offense, honestly, but I don't think you have any clue what you're talking about.

Search ebay for "Steam Deck"

That's your actual price and not the MSRP all this articles quote as "What a great, cheap price!" since realistically, most people just won't bother with waiting lists and preorders and there's just far more people that want a unit but Valve just won't sell them.

Putting an item for sale means that you place and order and they start processing and shipping. Otherwise is not actually for sale it's a waiting list and very few people get units and that's from the even fewer people that will bother to click on that "Register" page to begin with most just go "Oh not available yet, ok" and forget about it.

 

[Puiu]

Still no word on general availability *without* a reservation system or outside of the very limited number of countries that can even enter said reservation system.

So I still maintain that for as long as they keep up this "Reserve for the privilege of giving us money for a product" system, the price tags are unrealistic: Valve didn't really have to subsidize the cost of the handhelds and sell them at a lost they can avoid a ton of overhead by basically building to order: no speculation or slow moving cycles and more importantly, no revenue share with more widely available sales channels so even with thin margins it's 100% profit for them so margin doesn't needs to be as wide and henceforth, you can maintain your claims of "Only 399!" if you are literally not making it available for people except months to years down the line at the best of cases.

So tl;dr I just don't think saying their console is so much cheaper than competitors is fair at this point under this sales strategy: if availability is not there then price claims are meaningless: we've learned that from GPUs but because not it's Valve *now* people are willing to forget all those lessons and not look at the *actual* street price which should be resellers and scalpers on ebay. That's how much it *actually* cost if you consider the actual demand and not the intentionally constrained and controlled one created by Valve.

Priority is always given to where they can sell them the fastest with the least troubles for logistics. Everybody does this. Considering the low profit margins for the hardware, I'm sure Valve tried really hard to reduce shipping and logistics costs so that they don't go too much into the red.

Given that millions of units have been ordered/reserved, they have their work cutout for them for a year or two