Valve has officially announced earlier today that its upcoming handheld PC gaming system, the Steam Deck, will be delayed by two months to February. The handheld was supposed to release later this year, but will instead start shipping in February 2022 due to supply chain issues.
“The launch of Steam Deck will be delayed 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.”, a section of the official blog post reads.
The company further noted that this new date only applies to the first wave of orders that will go out. If one had ordered the Steam Deck and it was set to ship in the first wave around the end of the year, it will not ship in February instead, all future waves will be shifted accordingly. Those who preordered a Steam Deck are encouraged to check their updates availably on the official Steam Deck page.
This same global chip shortage has affected the development of many other consoles and prevented players from being able to purchase them, such as the PS5 and Xbox Series X, and even non-gaming companies like Apple with the production of iPhones.
The Steam Deck was originally revealed in July by Valve, who showed it off as a mobile alternative to PC gaming. It’s available in up to three models, including the base edition, which costs $400 and sports 64GB of internal storage for games, and two other models come that feature solid-state drives are priced at $529 (for 256GB) and $649 (for 512GB), respectively. Players would be able to connect any model to an external display via a separately sold dock, which Valve has yet to reveal pricing info of.
