Valve will start selling Steam Deck on February 25

Valve will release its Steam Deck handheld on February 25. The company announced this in a blog post. On that date, the first users with a reservation will be able to order a Steam Deck from the company. The first models will be shipped from February 28.

Valve writes in the blog post that users with a reservation can expect an invitation to purchase a Steam Deck around 7 p.m. GMT on February 25th. Customers then have 72 hours to order their pre-ordered copy. After those three days, their copy goes to the next person on the waiting list. The first Steam Decks will ship on February 28, and Valve says it wants to send out invites every week.

The invitations will be sent in the order in which the reservations were made. Users are only given the option to order the model they have actually reserved. So it is not possible to change the storage configuration when ordering with a reservation. Users who have not placed a reservation will not be able to order a Steam Deck on February 25, but it is possible to place a new reservation. Users who do so are expected to be able to purchase a Steam Deck “after the second quarter.” This applies to all three models.

Valve initially planned to sell the Steam Deck from December 2021, but the company later postponed it to February. The reason for this was the global chip shortage. The handheld console features an AMD semi-custom apu with four Zen 2 cores and an RDNA 2 GPU with eight compute units. The company began accepting Steam Deck reservations on July 16, 2021. The expected delivery time quickly increased.