Valve says Steam Deck production will 'be in the hundreds of thousands' by next month

Steam Deck shot from above — (Image credit: Future)

If you're sat in the long queue for a Valve Steam Deck then designer, Lawrence Yang, has some positive words of encouragement, mainly regarding how many Decks the company is going to be producing now that we've had an effective launch of the device. Speaking with IGN (via Forbes) he says the company expects the launch to "ramp very quickly" and that by the second month hundreds of thousands of Decks will be filing off the production line.

We're big fans of the Steam Deck here on PC Gamer, it's one of the most versatile gaming PCs we've had our hands on and its huge potential currently outweighs the not-quite-there-yet nature of the software. Ever as it was with SteamOS, eh? Our biggest concern, beyond even the Steam Deck battery life, or the noise it makes, is whether Valve is really capable of making enough to satisfy demand.

"We had to delay for supply chain reasons," says Yang, "those continue to be issues, but we are surmounting them. We imagine that the launch is going to ramp, in production terms, it'll ramp very quickly.

"In the first month very quickly we'll be in the tens of thousands, by the second month we'll be in the hundreds of thousands. And beyond that it'll grow even quicker."

That certainly gives us hope that this impressive chonky boi handheld will actually be able to get into the hands of the gamers that want it.

Steam in your hands

Steam Deck with an image from Elden Ring overlayed on the screen — (Image credit: Future, FromSoftware)

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We asked him if he had any idea when such a swiftly gratified purchase might happen and he couldn't say: "No, because the demand is high, so it's going to be a while 'til we can make them… 'til we're caught up some."

But still, there's some good news for those people making a purchase today, or already sitting in the post Q2 netherworld of Steam Deck reservations.

"Once we launch," Yang says, "the 'after Q2' time slot will become more granular and clearer. And we'll be updating those dates for folks in that window as we go."

So, once production has properly ramped up Valve will be in a far better position to assess just how long it's going to take to go through the pre-orders and get to your point in the queue.

Who knows, maybe it won't be as long as you fear?

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Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.