Gamers Scramble To Buy Steam Deck OLED But Are Met With Frustration
by
Thiago Trevisan
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Thursday, November 16, 2023, 02:43 PM EDT
Please Valve, take my money and let me buy your Steam Deck OLED, thought numerous gamers as they try to get their hands on Valve's newest release. With some headaches along the way, it appears unfortunately, that this is a a tall order currently. If you're old enough to remember the great GPU shortage of the early 2020s (we hope you are), you'll be familiar with the frustrating checkout process when a store's page is inundated with demand.
This has been my experience trying to get the transaction to go through, to no avail. While the Steam Store appears to show the Steam Deck OLED in stock, when going through the entire checkout process, it results in an unexpected error occurring. Having tried different payment methods and browsers was of no help in defeating the mighty errors for the Steam Deck OLED checkout.
Aiming high for the Steam Deck 1TB OLED, we decided to search around and see if anyone else had these issues before giving up my quest. It seems like various users have been reporting these checkout issues on the Steam Forums, so it appears much more widespread than you might think.
While there is no information yet if these checkout errors are due to the surge in demand or some other issue, it certainly does raise the question for this particular product. While the Steam Deck OLED has some fantastic upgrades, mainly its namesake OLED screen, it's not a major update to the original Steam Deck LCD.
The official Steam Deck account on X has also officially relayed the information that they're working on the issues concerning the Steam Store checkout. While this is frustrating for those attempting to place orders, there is some consolation knowing you're not the only one. We can confirm that at least the 1TB model appears to be having these issues, so your mileage may vary on the other model choices. We're willing to guess it is likely the store in general that is overwhelmed with all of the traffic or some similar related issue.
During these errors, the Steam Store page listing the OLED models seemed mostly unchanged. We did notice an "Out of Stock" come up briefly for the 1TB model, but then disappeared and was not reproducible after refreshing the page. All models still show a 3-5 business day delivery date, which either is not properly being updated or does not indicate any large demand to be the culprit here.
Do recall that Valve considers this Steam Deck OLED a limited run, meaning it isn't an entirely likely to have the same sell period as the original Steam Deck. While it is too early to see if demand or low production numbers are the issue that have overwhelmed the ordering system, it certainly harkens back to an earlier time where new tech products were seemingly impossible to acquire.
Update: A few hours later, I was able to finally get the Steam Deck OLED Limited Edition after Valve had finished fixing the store page.
