Announced with great fanfare on July 15 for a launch initially scheduled for December 2021, the Steam Deck has finally been real since February 25. While the sending rate was until now limited to one wave per week, Valve has just announced that they are now able to increase deliveries to two waves of sending per week.
Half-Life, the beginning
Valve is typically the kind of company that inspires sympathy and no one is able to say anything bad about it. Kind of like Nintendo. Where, conversely, Sony and Microsoft will always have their detractors. In short, the kind of company that we systematically cite as an example and that we love to adore.
Back more than 25 years ago, we are in 1996 and Valve was then only a very small video game development studio created by two colleagues, Mike Harrington and the iconic Gabe Newell.
These two met at Microsoft and they both contributed in their own way to the success of Microsoft, Gabe having worked on Windows 1.0 and Mike is one of the designers of Windows NT. Solid background guys!
Valve’s success is immediate, their first game, Half-Life, released in 1998, will forever mark PC gamers and its unpretentious little multiplayer mod would become one of the most played games on the planet even today. today: Counter-Strike.
The sequel is success, always success with Half-Life 2, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Portal 2 and the latest, Half-Life: Alyx, the standard bearer of VR.
Along with game development, Gabe Newell thinks big for his business and launches Steam in 2003, which would quickly become essential for the distribution of online content from all publishers on the PC. But the story was just beginning…
Steam Deck, a fanfare announcement, a launch in the fog
It was in 2013 that Valve entered the hardware market for the first time with the Steam Machines. (or SteamBox). Machines halfway between the console and the PC, with scalable configurations, running on Steam OS and as easy to use as a console. The marketing of these products stopped in 2018 without really knowing the expected success.
The following year, it was on the side of virtual reality (VR) that we found Valve. In full development of Half-Life: Alyx (exclusively playable in VR), Valve cannot find a “perfect” VR headset on the market for its ambitious game which was to reconnect with the series that created its legend.
Neither one nor two, the Valve Index VR headset was released in June 2019, a few months before Half-Life: Alyx.
And so then, after endless rumors, on July 15, 2021, Valve announced its famous Steam Deck, its hybrid portable PC-console that everyone has been talking about ever since.
If pre-orders started on July 16, the Steam Deck was originally scheduled to be released in December 2021, before Christmas. It was finally on February 25 that the first shipments took place at the rate of a new wave of shipments per week.
Suffering like all its competitors, whether console manufacturers or electronic chip suppliers, Valve has accumulated delays, leaving doubts as to its ability to ensure orders.
But we learn today that Valve was going to be able to significantly increase this rate, at the rate of two waves per week.
What to satisfy the dissatisfied? Either way, the machine is of course still available for pre-orders on the Steam site, but that deliveries for those who make a reservation today won’t be until October 2022 or later.
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
As a reminder, the Steam Deck is available for pre-order in 3 versions, starting at $458. You can find all the information and our impressions in the Jikaa test.