Valve Drops Steam Deck Price For Steam's 20th Anniversary
Twenty years ago this week, Valve changed the face of PC gaming with the launch of the Steam game download service. A little over a year and a half ago, the company did it again with the release of the Steam Deck, a Linux-based handheld console that is, at least in theory, compatible with the Steam library. (In practice, Valve is still in the process of verifying which games run well on the Steam Deck by default, which need manual tweaks, and which don't work at all.)
To commemorate that 20-year anniversary, Valve announced a week-long sale on Thursday: Direct sales of the Steam Deck from now through September 21 will be, depending on the model, 10% to 20% off. More specifically, the base $399.00 model (64GB eMMC storage) is 10% off for a sale price of $359.10, the mid-tier $529.00 model (256 GB of a faster, NVMe SSD) is discounted by 15% to $449.65, and the top $649.00 model (an even faster 512GB SSD plus "Premium anti-glare etched glass") is discounted 20% to $519.20. Aside from the top model, that's not the level of discount that you would get if buying one of Valve's certified refurbished Steam Decks (which are priced at $319.00, $419.00, and $519.00), but those are out of stock so often that they can't be counted on as anything resembling a sure thing.
What do you get and when do you get it?
As of this writing, Valve's storefront estimates the "expected delivery date" for Steam Deck orders as seven to fourteen days. Shipping is included in the purchase price, with Federal Express handling deliveries in the United States and Canada (shipped from a warehouse in Carol Stream, Illinois), as well as either DHL or GLS being the shipper in the United Kingdom and European Union (shipped out of a warehouse in Waalwijk, the Netherlands).
Spec-wise, the Steam Deck boasts an AMD APU consisting of a Zen 2 CPU (four cores with eight threads) running from 2.4GHz to 3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32) and a Van Gogh GPU running at 1.0GHz to 1.6GHz. It also includes 16GB RAM that's shared between the system and the GPU, while the storage ranges from PCIe Gen 2 x1 for the 64GB model to PCIe Gen 3 x4 or PCIe Gen 3 x2 for the other models.