Valve has confirmed two tasty bits of info today for those waiting on getting a Steam Deck, and for those curious about how things are currently going.
While a Valve developer teased recently that production was better than expected so more people are getting their purchase emails, as of today the new reservation windows are actually up and so you might find if you were in Q4 you might now be in Q3. As they said on Twitter:
Great news! We are making more Steam Decks than ever, and have just updated shipping window estimates for reservation holders. If you were previously in the Q4 (Oct-Dec) window, take a look - you might be in Q3 now!
As for how things are going?
Well, it's clearly a success but how much of one? In a follow-up Twitter post they gave a tiny bit of insight without revealing any numbers but it's obviously good news:
Another fun stat - the number of Steam Deck reservations being made on a daily basis continues to grow, and is at its highest since our launch earlier this year!📈
Exciting times. This is great for the Steam Deck and SteamOS of course but also Linux Gaming as a whole. No surprise to see the Steam Deck has been in the top 5 of the Weekly Global Top Sellers for nearly half a year and a lot of that at number 1.
Hopefully at some point we will see more games with anti-cheat roll out support for Steam Deck and Proton, so all Linux gamers can benefit from it. Looking at you, Destiny 2.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Metallinatus Aug 24, 2022
Now we just need more and more developers to see this market and capitalize on it!
i mean, android support gamepad, good luck finding good games on playstore to use it.
not to mention the contribution its doing to the linux ecosystem.
gradyvuckovic Aug 25, 2022
By normal console standards, success is anything over 30 million units. But Valve's goal is simply to get more people gaming on Linux. So even if the Deck only gets a million people gaming on Linux, that's still success in my opinion. As that represents a major boost to our 'population'. Especially when it seems many of the new Linux gamers are people coming from outside of the Linux space, people who are in many cases even console gamers. Not the usual Linux experts who know Linux inside-out. Which is great, we need more of that kind of casual user in our ranks.
I wouldn't be surprised if Valve hit 1 million units, I wouldn't be surprised if they hit 2 or 3 even once they open up worldwide, or hit even 5 million once they start selling in physical stores.
With those kinds of numbers, we can be certain that game compatibility and third party support for Linux will only continue to improve across the board. It's not like the Switch, ensuring game compatibility with Linux is much easier for developers, in many cases it even happens by accident thanks to Proton. And a few million Linux gamers would be more than enough incentive for most developers to ensure the compatibility is there.
It really is the year of Linux gaming. As the legends foretold.
BlackBloodRum Aug 25, 2022
Quoting: PixelDropSweet, mine got moved from Q4 to Q3 too. I'm a 64GB model since I'm okay with slower load times off SD cards.
Don't worry! If you get a good SD card you won't even notice that you're running off an SD card. Certainly not to the point of feeling "slower load times"
I have two SD Cards and use them for games without any performance degradation, despite having the 512GB model
So no worries!
Quoting: BlackBloodRumQuoting: PixelDropSweet, mine got moved from Q4 to Q3 too. I'm a 64GB model since I'm okay with slower load times off SD cards.
Don't worry! If you get a good SD card you won't even notice that you're running off an SD card. Certainly not to the point of feeling "slower load times"
I have two SD Cards and use them for games without any performance degradation, despite having the 512GB model
So no worries!
That's what I'm hoping. Of course at this point anything better than the switch will be like lighting. Switch games tend to take forever to load, especially if they're off a cart. Baffles me to no end why they made the game carts slower than reading of an SD card.
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