Even Steam’s servers buckled under the Steam Deck pre-order rush.

This week, Valve announced Steam Deck: a hybrid between PC and console that brings all the benefits of the first to the forms of the second. The impact it has had on social media seems to have been most convincing – influenced, perhaps, by the disappointing performance of the Nintendo Switch OLED – so apparently there was a desire to reserve the machine. I really want to.

The Steam Deck pre-order reservations started, as it was already known, on July 16 at 7:00 p.m. Just one day after its official presentation; but not all stakeholders have been able to secure one because the platform has simply collapsed. Clearly, the data traffic derived from the new product has a lot to do with the whole thing.

Logging into Steam is not a problem, but early buyers have had to deal with delays in loading the corresponding token. Or the buy button within it. Some have also received emails with error messages, forcing them to check out again. At the time of this writing, approximately half an hour after the opening of reservations, problems of the style are still experienced.

Frankly, it is difficult to resist the Steam Deck pre-order reservation because Valve barely asks for a commitment of four euros in advance regardless of the model you want to buy; but it is striking that there is so much interest in this hardware. Steam users are used to the platform experiencing slowdowns of this type every time a round of sales is kicked off, but in those cases, we are talking about thousands of games with very aggressive offers, not a machine valued at hundreds of euros.

Source: Polygon