When the Steam Deck was first revealed its initial release was limited to a select few countries with promises from Valve that more territories would be added eventually and that has now been announced, but South Africa is still not mentioned by name.

As Valve has just sent out its second batch of emails to those who reserved the device for Q1 this year, the company also provides us some updates about future reservations and, more importantly for many countries, availability:

• “We have been working hard to increase the number of Steam Decks we can produce this year, and we now have more clarity on our longer term production schedule. As a result, in addition to Q1 and Q2, reservers can now see if they are in the Q3 order availability window. You can check the Steam Deck product page (while logged in) to see your reservation window.
• We are also looking into making Steam Deck available in more countries, including Japan, by the end of the year. The team is continuing to push on all of these fronts, and will share updates as we get more info.”

So while Japan gets a nod here the rest of the world continues to be in the dark about getting its hands on this new handheld PC from Steam.

2022 still has a lot of legs so we’re hopeful that we’ll at least get an announcement of more countries that will be officially supported, even if South Africa isn’t one of them.

Our country has been left out of all the past Valve hardware releases with the much maligned but still beloved Steam Controller and the ill-fated Steam Machines never offered officially this side of the world.

With both those lines of products now cancelled we do harbour some hope that we’ll see a local Steam Deck release, even if that’s just blind optimism.