Bad news for Steam Deck buyers: the handheld gaming PC won’t arrive in December as originally planned.
On Wednesday, Valve announced the great chip shortage is forcing the company to delay Steam Deck’s launch by two months. “We’re sorry about this—we did our best to work around the global supply chain issues, but due to material shortages, components aren’t reaching our manufacturing facilities in time for us to meet our initial launch dates,” the company wrote.
Instead, Valve plans to start shipping the first Steam Deck units in February. In the meantime, the company is pushing back delivery estimates for all existing pre-orders. February "will be the new start date of the reservation queue—all reservation holders keep their place in line but dates will shift back accordingly,” the company added.
Pre-order customers can view their re-scheduled Steam Deck ship date on the Steam Store. One PCMag staffer who pre-ordered a unit said his own reservation got kicked back from Q1 to Q2. My own pre-order was pushed to sometime after Q2.
We had held out hope the Steam Deck would arrive in time for this year’s holiday season since the product itself was first announced in July. In September, Valve also began shipping developer edition Steam Decks to game creators. But it seems the company is struggling to produce enough units to meet the first round of pre-orders amid a historic chip shortage that is affecting the entire electronics industry.
If you pre-order a Steam Deck today, don’t expect your order to arrive until after 2022’s second quarter, according to Valve's website.