In a blog post uploaded earlier this month, Valve announced that the Steam Deck was still on track for a February 2022 release. Today, the company finally provided a concrete date: on February 25, those who reserved one of the highly-anticipated handheld consoles will receive an email. Those customers will have exactly 72 hours from the receipt of their order email to make their final purchase before their reservation is passed to the next person in the queue. The first units will ship starting on February 28, and Valve is planning on sending out new order email batches weekly. The press review embargo will also lift on February 25, so keep an eye out for first impressions.
Valve gave a few additional details regarding the console’s release. Invites will begin sending out after 10:00 AM PST on February 25, and order emails will be sent in the same order in which reservations were made. Customers can only order the Steam Deck model that they originally reserved. Deposits made for reservations will be applied to the final price of the Steam Deck, and shipping costs will be included.
Logging into the Steam Database will now allow gamers to see the list of games with an official Steam Deck rating. Currently, about half of the tested Steam catalog “works flawlessly.” This includes some heavy-hitters like Dark Souls III, Death Stranding, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Dishonored. Currently, the only games that seem completely incompatible are VR titles.
Yesterday, Valve announced that the portable PC would feature Dynamic Cloud Sync, allowing players to easily jump between PC and handheld saves as long as they have an internet connection. This will also work when simply putting the Steam Deck into suspend mode without fully exiting a game. Putting the handheld PC into sleep mode will trigger the feature, instantly uploading “all modified save game data” to the cloud. As this feature has to be manually enabled game by game, it may take some time to implement, but developers are already hard at work.