Steam Deck fans who jumped at the chance of reserving a unit when pre-orders initially opened in July will likely get their units in just a few months.
That’s according to Valve designer Greg Coomer, who talked about his company’s heavily hyped gaming device in a new interview with PC Gamer and provided confidence that it would be shipping sometime in February as indicated in the official Steam Deck FAQ. Coomer noted that Valve was disappointed in the delay of the device, which was prompted by supply chain issues, but that the first units should be in the hands of gamers relatively soon.
“We do feel like we’re on track for that,” Coomer told the publication. “We’re still bummed that we had to move from end of this year to beginning of next. But yeah, all the signs are pointing to us being able to ship in February.”
Coomer went on to clarify that the Steam Deck’s debut won’t be a paper launch, promising that a decent portion of orders will be fulfilled when the device is officially released. Optimism for the device appears to be extremely high at Valve, as Coomer expects to sell millions of Steam Decks by 2023.
“It’s a real product launch, so many thousands of people right away are going to receive Decks as soon as we’re able to ship them,” Coomer explained. “But even talking about thousands would be quite low compared to the volumes we’re shooting for in the first few months.”
“We’re going to have a launch that looks like a significant number of users right out of the gate, and then build that over time, rather than having the biggest splash on day one and then generally declining after that.If you extend the timeline out through 2022 and all the way to 2023, we expect to be building on our numbers constantly throughout that whole time, to the point where there’s many millions of customers if things go the way we think they will, who are using Steam Deck by the end of that year or so, through 2023.”
Source: PC Gamer