Valve's partner Komodo has announced they've teamed up with Acer, as they're bringing the Steam Deck to retail stores in Asia.
This initial extra partnership focuses on Hong Kong and Taiwan with both the Steam Deck and Valve's official Docking Station hitting stores tomorrow, March 17th. They also said the Steam Deck will be available to demo at these stores too, so potential buyers can get a proper look. Here's the locations opening up for Steam Deck purchases:
PREDATOR Proshops in Hong Kong:
- Golden Computer Centre Shop.
- K11 MUSEA Shop.
Acer Retail Store in Taiwan:
- Guang Hua Digital Plaza.
- Taoyuan NOVA.
- Zhongli NOVA.
- Taichung NOVA.
- Hsinchu NOVA.
- Tainan Rainbow.
At some point in the future, Komodo will also be expanding this retail launch into Japan and South Korea. No other details on timing for that was given though.
From the press release:
“We are excited to work with Acer Gaming to continue toward our goal of delivering Steam Deck to the widest range of customers,” said Ricky Uy, CEO of Komodo.
“Acer Gaming cooperates with popular game industry brands to create a complete gaming life experience from offline to online," said Ting-Yang Hsu, General Manager of Acer Gaming. “Through this collaboration with Komodo, we are demonstrating the importance Acer Gaming places on the gaming market.”
Could be a very nice boost for Steam Deck numbers! As I keep saying: we need more people buying it and playing on it, to have more game developers care and support it. Having more game devs optimise directly for it would be great. We still need Valve to expand into other regions too, hopefully they will have more to announce this year.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
fenglengshun Mar 17, 2023
Quoting: CatKillerWell, sure, but the existing Linux bit of that 132 million is a titch over 1%, so like 1.5 million, max. A couple of million units would more than double that. So I would have expected if sales were high, the variations in the sampling would not normally be enough to make Linux numbers actually fall.Quoting: Purple Library GuyYeah . . . but I was really expecting, given the apparent success of the Steam Deck, that it would kind of swamp all that variability.The Steam user base is huge, with 132 million monthly active users. There are 20 million people on Steam right now. A couple of million units is just a drop in the ocean. If the Steam Deck sold as many as the best selling console ever (PS2, 155 million) to brand new, never on Steam before, customers, the Steam user base would be less than twice as big.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 17 March 2023 at 6:55 am UTC
Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, sure, but the existing Linux bit of that 132 million is a titch over 1%, so like 1.5 million, max. A couple of million units would more than double that. So I would have expected if sales were high, the variations in the sampling would not normally be enough to make Linux numbers actually fall.No. The 132 million is the number of users that were on Steam in a particular month, not the total number of users. The total number of users is higher, but how much higher only Valve knows, and to estimate how much higher you'd need a model of which proportion of users would be online in a particular month, which we also don't have.
We can estimate (assuming that all Deck users are active, because they've just bought a new shiny, and that one hardware sample = one user, which isn't realistic but getting better than that approximation would be super hard) that the total active Steam Linux user base is five times larger than the number of Decks sold, since SteamOS is only 20% of the distros sampled by the survey, and the total active Steam user base is 80 times bigger than that. You get a similar Steam Deck is 1/400th of the Steam user base estimate if you look at the GPU stats: the Deck's GPU is 0.27% of the GPUs surveyed.
Last edited by CatKiller on 17 March 2023 at 2:44 pm UTC
Quoting: mark348It it in retail in EU?
Not that I'm aware of. I think this is the first drop in retail stores.
TheRiddick Mar 20, 2023
There are some online retailers here selling them but the markup is too much IMO.
It is a very odd thing how AU and NZ don't get the steam deck (direct from Valve) but it is what it is.
I'll probably just skip it this gen.
Was interested closer to launch but now I have other things on my mind.
As someone based in said city, this is groundbreaking. Over here we don't even have the choice of getting pre-built Linux x86 devices from the likes of Lenovo/Dell/HP; while the Steam Deck isn't a business class laptop, it is still a modern x86 Linux device that you can actually try out in person! Hopefully it garners more local interest in SteamOS (or dare I say, Linux in general) as a viable gaming platform.
Quoting: RelsreRelevant HK local news article (in Chinese, but hey there's a photo of Decks in the wild!): https://www.hkepc.com/21381/
Thanks for sharing!
[discovery channel voice]
A rare photograph of a Steam Deck in the wild - a species luckily not threatened with extinction...
Quoting: RelsreAs someone based in said city, this is groundbreaking. Over here we don't even have the choice of getting pre-built Linux x86 devices from the likes of Lenovo/Dell/HPMan, no wonder there's so little Linux use over there.
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