Our friends down under will finally be able to buy an officially supported Steam Deck, as it heads to Australia officially in November. It's been a long road to get there, but it's finally happening which opens up Australia to other Valve hardware now too.
The Steam Deck LCD was originally released back in February 2022 and was later expanded with Valve's Komodo partnership to also be sold in Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. Much later in November 2023, Valve then revealed the much better Steam Deck OLED.
From the press email the prices will be (inclusive of GST):
- 256GB LCD: $649.00 AUD
- 512GB OLED: $899.00 AUD
- 1TB OLED: $1049.00 AUD
Not bad pricing, and with the OLED truly being a much better device you really should grab that model if you can afford it. It's truly the definitive Steam Deck.
It's only going to get better too with the upcoming release of SteamOS 3.6.
Once Valve are eventually ready to talk more about a potential Steam Deck 2, this should also hopefully mean Australia won't be left out in the cold on release day. Although, it's also another signal that the current Steam Deck model is here to stay for some time yet.
You can follow along for more using our Steam Deck Tag (with a dedicated RSS feed), our Steam Deck Forum Category and the Steam Deck Channel in Discord.
See more on the Steam Deck website.
Quoting: CatKillerDo we know if they're partnering with someone, or doing it themselves?
Probably not.
I honestly don't know, which dorpbear Valve had to kill, but since their release misses any reference to their future partners and such releases are prime real estate for partnership announcements I feel safe to assume that they're not partnering with anybody except Australian quality control.
Quoting: LoudTechieI'm still curious what took them so long.Lord Gaben is being wary of emus. I cannot blame him.
Last edited by Leahi84 on 11 October 2024 at 12:15 pm UTC
Quoting: LoudTechieThat suggests to me that they did want to partner with someone like they've done for the Asian countries it's been released in (they said that Japan and Australia were "furthest along" when asked about other countries during the conference around the launch), but it fell through and they've taken it on themselves - hence the delay. You're right that if they were partnering with someone they'd probably have said so in the announcement so that they were treating that partner well.Quoting: CatKillerDo we know if they're partnering with someone, or doing it themselves?
Probably not.
I honestly don't know, which dorpbear Valve had to kill, but since their release misses any reference to their future partners and such releases are prime real estate for partnership announcements I feel safe to assume that they're not partnering with anybody except Australian quality control.
Quoting: Leahi84I don't have a Steam deck myself as I'm not a fan of portable gaming at all (Don't even play games on my Pixel phone) and don't want to play games unless its on my PC, but I'm glad for my nephew who hasn't been able to get one down there yet.Most of my usage has been on the sofa or in bed - you don't have to take it outside for it to be useful.
Quoting: CatKillerAnother nice feature is that you can hook it up to the TV using any dock (including Valve's own) or USB-C attachment without worrying about some weird proprietary connector like the Switch.Quoting: Leahi84I don't have a Steam deck myself as I'm not a fan of portable gaming at all (Don't even play games on my Pixel phone) and don't want to play games unless its on my PC, but I'm glad for my nephew who hasn't been able to get one down there yet.Most of my usage has been on the sofa or in bed - you don't have to take it outside for it to be useful.
Quoting: Leahi84I don't have a Steam deck myself as I'm not a fan of portable gaming at all (Don't even play games on my Pixel phone) and don't want to play games unless its on my PC, but I'm glad for my nephew who hasn't been able to get one down there yet.
I wouldn't even ponder the idea of playing with my phone. But having a small Linux PC to play on the sofa or in the bed on the other hand...
Last edited by Eike on 11 October 2024 at 4:25 pm UTC
Quoting: EikeQuoting: Leahi84I don't have a Steam deck myself as I'm not a fan of portable gaming at all (Don't even play games on my Pixel phone) and don't want to play games unless its on my PC, but I'm glad for my nephew who hasn't been able to get one down there yet.
I wouldn't even ponder the idea of playing with my phone. But having a small Linux PC to play on the sofa or in the bed on the other hand...
I guess in addition I prefer the high end graphics and resolution my PC and 1440 monitor gives me, so it's just not interesting to me to play that stuff in a smaller screen with graphics turned down. To each their own.
Last edited by Leahi84 on 11 October 2024 at 5:49 pm UTC
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