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.
It's not chip restrictions, it's not copyright law, it probably isn't wiretapping law and it isn't the market.
Does Australia have some product safety law it failed to meet, such as "all gaming consoles should have minimally EAL5 rated hardware."
Could it be Chinese import/export restrictions.
The closest I get is that it's according to the american government a "small competitive market", but that applies to a lot of their already released countries.
Last edited by LoudTechie on 11 October 2024 at 8:45 am UTC
Quoting: LoudTechieI'm still curious what took them so long.
It's not chip restrictions, it's not copyright law, it probably isn't wiretapping law and it isn't the market.
Does Australia have some product safety law it failed to meet, such as "all gaming consoles should have minimally EAL5 rated hardware."
Could it be Chinese import/export restrictions.
The closest I get is that it's according to the american government a "small competitive market", but that applies to a lot of their already released countries.
I would speculate, the engineering challenges incurred when playing the Steam Deck upside down.
Quoting: HighballI would speculate, the engineering challenges incurred when playing the Steam Deck upside down.The reverse gravity interferes with the electron flow, so they had to invert the chip design to be compatible with the southern hemisphere.
But now that Valve expands delivery to a new country, it makes me wonder if they already made preparations to sell in other less mentioned areas or if they do it slowly one by one.
Quoting: LoudTechieI'm still curious what took them so long.Spider proofing.
Quoting: whizseQuoting: LoudTechieI'm still curious what took them so long.Spider proofing.
Localisation:
It was missing a "tries to kill you feature."
Quoting: whizseHey im not that bad!Quoting: LoudTechieI'm still curious what took them so long.Spider proofing.
Quoting: pleasereadthemanualDarn. Now I can't comment anything in the Steam Deck posts anymore.Until November you still can and it's still not a truly global release.
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