Last updated Friday, July 16 at 3:44 pm PDT.
The people want Steam Decks, apparently. Moments after reservations for Valve's new handheld gaming device went live, parts of the Steam store stopped working: Mainly, the part where you can reserve a Steam Deck, right here.
We were all seeing the "something went wrong" screen above at first, but as of 10:20 am PDT, two of us in the US managed to put in reservations. Others on the PC Gamer team ran into one or more of the following messages:
- "There seems to have been an error initializing or updating your transaction. Please wait a minute and try again or contact support for assistance."
- "Your account is too new to reserve early."
- "Reservation Servers are busy, please try again."
- "It looks like you've been attempting a lot of purchases in the last few hours. Please wait a while before trying again."
Despite the server troubles, it seems lots of Steam Deck reservations have been made.
The first reserved Steam Decks are expected to start shipping this December, but for those putting in reservations now, the expected fulfillment date has moved to Q3 2022 for the 512 GB version, and Q1 or Q2 2022 for the others. (This may be different depending on your region.)
We're not sure how many reservations have been made, or how many Steam Deck units were allotted for each shipping window and region.
Bots run by eBay resellers have become notorious for snatching up consoles and graphics cards as soon as they go on sale, but that's probably not what's causing server issues here. To combat resellers, Valve has restricted the $5 reservations to those who had a Steam account before June. That restriction lifts on Sunday. However, some have been getting the "your account is too new" error even when their accounts are not new.
Most likely, these errors are just Steam being Steam: It also struggles every time a new Steam sale begins.
That said, Steam Deck reservations are appearing on eBay for absurd prices, and some of them are selling. Perhaps the purchasers are in regions such as South Korea and Australia, where Steam Decks aren't available to reserve yet.
If you do manage to reserve a Steam Deck, you'll be notified in the future when you can order it, at which point you'll have a window of time during which to pull the trigger. You'll have to order the same model you reserved. There are three:
- $399 for the 64GB version
- $529 for the 256GB version
- $649 for the 512GB version
The more expensive versions have faster storage, and you can add more (not fast) storage space to all three models with a MicroSD card. More on the Steam Deck specs here.
Steam Decks will start shipping to addresses in the United States, Canada, the European Union, and the UK this December, but only for those who were able to reserve them early, it seems. Availability in other regions will follow.
