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Valve today officially launched its Steam Deck gaming handheld device powered by an Arch Linux-based distribution and featuring the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
The official launch day means that Valve will start sending emails to the first batch of people who made a reservation for the Steam Deck device. If you’re reading this and you are one of the first to have made a reservation, you have 72 hours, from the moment you receive the email, to complete your purchase on Steam.
If you changed your mind and no longer want to buy the Steam Deck, or you miss the 72-hours window and don’t purchase the device, Valve will send your reservation to the next person in the queue.
If you haven’t reserved a Steam Deck yet, you can now do so starting today via the official website. Price starts from $399 USD or €419 or £349, and you should receive your order in Q2 2022. Meanwhile, Valve is working to send out the official Dock for Steam Deck to customers too.
As far as the supported games go, according to Valve’s ProtonDB database, there are more than 820 games that are playable or verified for the Steam Deck. About half of these games are officially verified for the Steam Deck on launch day, which means that they will play flawlessly, while the rest are playable but they may require some manual tweaking by the user to work correctly.
Valve’s Steam Deck gaming handheld is powered by Valve’s SteamOS 3.0 operating system, which is based on the lightweight, flexible, and rolling-release Arch Linux distribution, and comes with the KDE Plasma desktop environment and the Steam Client on top as the default user interface.
As part of the Steam Deck launch, Valve also updated its Steam gaming distribution platform with a new “Great On Deck” page if you want to check which games in your Steam library are compatible with Steam Deck.
Image credits: Valve
Last updated 2 years ago
