Picture: ValveĪs such, despite the Steam Deck being available in the US for almost a year now, its availability in other countries is somewhat lacking. The Steam Deck is not officially available in Australia, leaving customers to buy from marked up grey market importers.

Its focus is software and servers, so anything to do with hardware has bottlenecks when it comes to distribution. Valve isn’t a traditional games company, and it doesn’t have massive, worldwide, physical distribution networks like Nintendo or Sony do. The complications come when you’re living in Australia. Sure, it has a pretty abysmal battery life if you’re playing a big game, and the screen is nothing to write home about, but the freedom of playing your favourite games wherever you want? Little else can compare to that. On its face, it sounds like an appealing product. Simply sign in, download the game, and continue where you left off.

And since Steam has cloud integration for its game saves, you don’t have to restart your favourite game to keep playing it on the go. It wasn’t meant to play games at hundreds of frames per second at absurdly high resolutions like a high-end gaming PC or console would, it was just meant to play games well enough that you’d have a nice time with them.īecause the Deck uses your own existing Steam library, you don’t need to drop hundreds of dollars on games for your shiny new system – you already own them. Much like the Nintendo Switch, it was a handheld console with a fairly nice screen, built-in controls, and a few interesting additions like touch pads and capacitive analog stick tips. It promised a new way to play the games you already own on Steam, on the go, in bed or, if you really wanted, on the toilet. Valve announced the Steam Deck back in July 2021, at a time when the Nintendo Switch was riding high after a series of huge successes. If you’re in Australia, you probably shouldn’t buy one - at least not yet. You might have heard of the Steam Deck, a handheld PC that can play a pretty big chunk of the Steam library.

Price of steam deck