For those that have placed an order for a Steam Deck, Valve had good news today, as barring any last minute issues due to the current conditions in the world, be that the pandemic, supply issues, shipping or some other unforeseen event, Valve should start shipments of the Steam Deck to its customers in February. The company didn’t give much else in terms of information about what stage the production is in, but did at least give a small update on what’s going on with regards to the software side of things.
Valve provided a photo of several development devices running their latest production build of the SteamOS, which appears to show some kind of test or diagnostics screen. The company is apparently also busy working on its Steam Deck Verified program to make sure that as many games as possible will work with the SteamOS and Steam Deck once it arrives in the hands of its customers. As such, Valve has been seeding more developer units to game developers and the company doesn’t appear to have been stingy either, as it claims to have sent "hundreds" of units in the last month and is apparently approving and shipping further units to more developers. It’ll be interesting to see if the Steam Deck can win over conventional PC gamers to a more portable device or not and how well games will play on it in the end.