It’s finally happening! After just about two and a half years of having to contend with (at best) unreliable third-party solutions, Australian gamers will finally be able to purchase the revered Steam Deck directly from Valve. This includes both the older LCD model and the upgraded OLED version, of course.
Valve’s designers and engineers spoke about the Deck’s Australian release with Press Start in a recent interview where they explained what this meant for the company’s presence in the land down under. The gist of it, though, boils down to Valve’s desire to set up a direct shipping route with its Aussie customers without having to go through third-party retailers. “It’s not super exciting or novel,” said Lawrence Yang when explaining why it took so long for this to finally happen. “It’s mostly like we had some financial due diligence to do just to make sure that from a duties and tax and everything standpoint that we’re set up to be able to legally operate and sell hardware [in Australia].”
Valve’s prepared the backend infrastructure for future hardware releases in Australia, too
The really interesting bit of Press Start’s interview is found in the responses put out by Valve’s hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat, who stated outright that Australia is now on the radar for any and all future hardware the company might put out: “We wanted to be able to sell [the Steam Deck] through Steam. And part of that is that we’re hoping that the investment we put into the infrastructure would allow us to sell future hardware in Australia much faster. We just want to do it once and do it correctly and pave the way for future things.”
Between the setup of Valve’s legal and shipping operations in Australia proper, and the organization of stock, shipping, returns, and all the other complications, it’s not hard to see why this process would take a while. Australia is a complex part of the shipping equation in general, though one might wonder why it took over two years for Valve to figure out how to best handle it all.
All grumbling aside, this is excellent news both for Valve and for its fans. Though there haven’t been very many big reveals about the Steam Deck as of late, important work on optimization and feature improvements is ongoing still.
In fact, the aforementioned interview specifically points out that the upcoming release of SteamOS 3.6 will include a substantial battery life bump for the old LCD models. Aldehayyat said that users can expect up to “10 to 15% extra battery life for [the] LCD,” which is an impressive feat.
The Steam Deck will be officially available in Australia from November onwards, starting at $649 AUD for the 256 GB LCD model, and with the 512 and 1 TB OLED models priced at $899 AUD and $1,049 AUD respectively.
