Steam Decks No Longer Require Reservations

Handheld gamers with huge Steam libraries, rejoice, for a most joyous day is upon us! In a new video that Valve posted to their official YouTube channel yesterday afternoon, they announced three pieces of news pertaining to the Steam Deck. I admittedly kind of let the cat out of the bag about the biggest piece of news in that video by titling this article the way I did, but I’ll go into more detail about that momentarily. Let’s run through all three bits of news Valve reported in that video in their original order.

Firstly, Valve revealed that their official Steam Deck docking station is now available. It comes packing three USB 3.1 Type-A ports for external keyboards and mice or “a million other peripherals,” a USB-C port for power, a gigabit Ethernet port, and two video outs, one HDMI and one DisplayPort. The dock will set you back $89 USD or your regional equivalent. Valve also clearly mentioned that if you don’t feel you want or need the first-party docking station, you can use any well-built USB-C docking station that you might already have lying around instead.

Next up, Valve went into some detail about the many, many software updates they’ve pushed out for the Steam Deck and SteamOS since the device launched. More specifically, they discussed new settings for things like screen resolution, image scaling, and frame rate, to name a couple of examples. They’ve also recently added onscreen keyboard support for more languages, namely Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Lastly, they briefly mentioned some updates to the device’s offline mode “to make it much more stable and reliable.”

Last up comes the biggest news of all. Valve appears to have been working around the clock for months to speed up the production of Steam Deck devices and get them into the hands of those who have added their names to the reservation queue. Well, to the delight of those who are still waiting for their Steam Deck and those who have hesitated to reserve one, now there is no reservation queue. Valve did make a point of mentioning, however, that “Of course, depending on how fast orders come in, we might have to start taking reservations again.”

Considering how quickly they’ve been powering through the queue for quite a while now, though, something tells me that’s rather unlikely. If it does happen, I suspect it wouldn’t be for very long. Personally, this news greatly excites me since I’ve been waiting to be able to afford a Steam Deck since day one. Now that there’s no line to buy one, perhaps that fateful day will come sooner. In the meantime, if you’re thinking about buying a Steam Deck yourself, I’d suggest you check out Mike’s review of the device.