Valve finally released Steam Deck yesterday. The company started shipping the first pre-orders to customers and the portable gaming console is now available on open sale on Valve's website. However, if you have not received an email from Valve regarding the shipping details of your reserved Steam Deck, you're not alone.
Valve has now announced that it is planning to ship the portable gaming console in small batches. In addition, it has also detailed how it plans to ship the rest of the pre-orders. Valve says that the first batch of emails has gone out today. The next batch of emails will go out on Monday, March 7, 2022, Valve notes. Similarly, subsequent batches will go out every Monday till June.
If you had a reservation for Q1, 2022, you'll receive an email from the company before the end of March. Similarly, if you had a reservation for Q2, 2022, expect to receive an email from Valve starting from April. But if you had a reservation for "After Q2 2022," Valve says to stay tuned for the "news soon." Perhaps shipping will be sorted out by then it won't have to ship it weekly, but only Valve knows about Q3 and Q4 for now.
- All people who are in the Q1 reservation window on the Steam Deck store page will receive an order email by the end of March. (Q1 is Quarter 1, or January through March).
- The first batch of emails has already gone out this morning.
- The next batch of emails will go out on Monday, March 7th. (It turns out the logistics work out better if we don't try to ship over a weekend.)
- We'll continue sending emails to Q1 reservers in the order their reservations were made on a weekly basis through the end of March (March 14th, 21st, 28th)
- In April, we'll start going through the Q2 queue in a similar fashion.
Valve says that it won't send an email to you until your Steam Deck unit is actually ready to ship. Those who receive the email will have 72 hours to decide to complete the purchase or to cancel their reservation. Yes, the $5 you spent on the reservation will be chopped off the device's selling price and you won't have to pay anything extra for shipping.
The first round of reviews of the Steam Deck is now out, and it seems that the device does have a few issues right now. And hopefully, when you receive your device, all the issues are sorted out by then. You can head over to Valve's website and place an order for the Steam Deck right now. it's worth noting that Steam Deck isn't a cheap portable gaming console and the 64GB storage model starts at $399, the 256GB option costs $529, and you will have to shell out $649 for the maxed-out version with 512GB storage space.