Steam Deck in High Demand; Over 100k Reservations in an Hour
Reservations for the Steam Deck console from Valve began on Friday. In a short period of time, the number of preorders of the new portable console exceeded 100 thousand. However, there were some problems on the way.
Yesterday, reservations for the recently announced Steam Deck console began. As expected, there is no shortage of those willing to buy the new hardware. We have already learned the first numbers of orders thanks to information provided on Twitter by Pavel Djundik, the creator of SteamDB. These are not official data from Valve, though.
SteamDB is a tool that provides users with much more insight into Steam and what's in its database. It "listens" to the stream of information sent by the Steam client. It is not affiliated with Valve in any way.
The numbers provided are for the first hours after the start of reservations. Valve's database "dumped" this information due to an HTML error. The vulnerability was spotted and fixed fairly quickly. The highest and most expensive version of Steam Deck reached a result of over 71 thousand ordered copies. The vast majority, 55 thousand reservations, came from North American countries - the United States and Canada. The model offering a 256 GB drive sold slightly worse, with a result of 33 thousand orders. Only 5 thousand reservations were recorded from the European Union. Pavel Djundik did not provide the number of pre-orders on the cheapest version. The first deliveries of the device are expected to begin in December, this year. You can still order the new console from Valve, but you have to reckon with much longer deadlines - especially for the 512 GB version.
Reservations for Steam Deck can be made by users with a Steam account registered in the US, Canada, the European Union, and the UK. Other regions of the world still have to wait.
As always, there were some problems when users tried to order the device. Some players could not complete the transaction or encountered various errors when trying to load the Steam website. Others received messages saying that their Steam account was "too new" even though they had been using it for years. Many applicants also received notices that they had exceeded the number of allowed transactions.
The recently announced Steam Deck is built around the idea of a private library of PC games that can be played on a portable console. But, as Valve admits, some of the most popular titles on Steam have some issues running on the device.
ProtonDB is a database that collects information from the players testing games using Proton and provides aggregate results on how they perform.
Proton is a tool integrated into Steam Play that makes it much easier to run Windows games on Linux.
According to reports gathered on ProtonDB, games like Destiny 2, PUBG, Apex Legends and Rainbow Six Siege won't work well with Valve's pre-installed SteamOS on consoles. This is all due to anti-cheates measures that don't activate on the Linux kernel-based system. This causes players to be cut off from multiplayer game servers.
Valve mentioned that the devs are currently working on "improving compatibility and support for anti-cheates measures". In case the developers' efforts yield no effect, we can always remove the pre-installed SteamOS and install Windows - Valve has been open about such possibility existing.
Despite various attempts to secure Steam Deck pre-orders, they failed to completely deter scalpers. The first offers with significantly inflated prices have already appeared online.
