Valve’s Servers Shit the Bed Due to Steam Deck Demand

Yesterday, Valve countered the upcoming arrival of the OLED Switch with its personal PC-based gaming handheld console, the $400 Steam Deck. Reservations opened right now, and it appears the Steam retailer simply can’t sustain.

Almost instantly after reservations for the Steam Deck went dwell at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT, Twitter was flooded with annoyed posts from potential prospects saying they couldn’t full their reservation, usually working into a number of errors or buy screens that timed out earlier than absolutely testing.

While the announcement for the Steam Deck might have come as a small shock, Steam’s person base has ballooned to greater than 120 million monthly users in 2020, so it most likely shouldn’t have been an enormous shock to see Valve’s servers falter when offered with such an enormous inflow of reservations.

For these at present nonetheless making an attempt to order a Steam Deck, I’ve some recommendation: If you’re capable of get to the purpose the place you enter your cost data, while you lastly verify the acquisition and also you see the Working button, simply let it go and don’t refresh. In my very own case, I used to be really capable of snag a reservation regardless of closing my browser tab solely after the Working button was biking for about 5 minutes, so be sure that to regulate your inbox for an e-mail affirmation.

Alternatively, in case you’ve run into the difficulty the place Steam says that you simply’ve tried to make too many current purchases, you’ll want to attend 10 minutes earlier than making an attempt once more to finalize your buy.

Some customers (together with myself) had been even hit with an error claiming that their Steam account was too new to make a reservation—my Steam account is greater than 15 years outdated, in order that was puzzling. Valve’s unique intention for delaying new Steam accounts from making Steam Deck reservations was to assist guarantee scalpers and different unauthorized resellers wouldn’t have the ability to scoop up the preliminary manufacturing run, which makes errors like that more and more annoying.

While Valve started taking reservations right now, the Steam Deck isn’t slated to start transport till December, which ought to give the corporate time to kind out orders and doubtlessly higher accommodate shipments based mostly on the variety of present reservations.

So in case you haven’t had any luck snagging a reservation simply but, be affected person, don’t refresh the order web page, and hold a watch out in your inbox for affirmation.