• This is likely the best chance for people in South Africa to get their hands on the Steam Deck, as two retailers are offering a big discount.
• Amazon and Makro are offering the Steam Deck 256GB LCD version for R7 999, down from R15 000.
• Amazon however is offering better advantages, like faster shipping and a longer return policy of 30 days.

South Africans who have been waiting for that perfect price to get their hands on a Steam Deck; the hour is upon us. Amazon.co.za is running a promotion on the 256GB LCD Steam Deck, seeing a nearly 40 percent discount.

The handheld console, which can be used to play most games on Steam has been discounted to R7 999, down from R13 042.64. It is the cheapest Steam Deck we have ever seen in South Africa after we saw a Cyber Monday deal of R10 299 late last year.

We found the discounted console through the folks at Cheap Gamer (h/t), and then stumbled upon the the same model of the Steam Deck also for R7 999 from Makro.

The question then becomes: which one should you get if they’re both the same price?

Both of the models on special right now are 256GB LCD versions of the Steam Deck (in black), and both are likely to be parallel imports. Valve does not sell the Steam Deck officially in South Africa, so it is up to companies like Amazon and Makro to import them from the United States or elsewhere.

This unfortunately means we don’t get support for the Steam Deck, so if it breaks or you buy a model that is faulty, there’s not much you can do aside from the local retailer’s return mechanisms. Any warranty claims will be handled by a third party, which may not be either Amazon or Makro.

Under the house we get to see a quadcore AMD Zen 2 CPU sporting 8 RDNA 2 CUs, paired with 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM.

One of the biggest problems with hand-held consoles is the duration of unwired gameplay, and this version of the Steam Deck promises between two to eight hours of gameplay through its 40Whr battery. This depends on the game you’re playing.

More hardware intensive games will gobble up the battery duration, while easier to run games will spend less. For example, you could play God of War Ragnarok for two hours, but Dwarf Fortress for more than seven.

Otherwise this model sports expandable storage up to 1TB through a microSD and you can connect the Steam Deck to an external display thanks to DisplayPort 1.4 support in the USB-C connector.

So hardware aside, the difference between choosing Amazon or Makro comes down to which you believe will be better for delivery. Both are offering free delivery, however Amazon is promising you’ll get it one day after ordering and Makro is promising two days after. But since Amazon is the ecommerce company, its promise is likely more believable than Makro, which may see further delays.

Makro has a 14 day return policy, while Amazon is offering a much longer 30 day policy. The Amazon version is also offering a carrying case, which is something the Makro version does not specify. Taking all of this into consideration we would go with Amazon.

The other disadvantage with Makro is it looks like stock is flying fast, while Amazon is yet to claim the same, so you may have a better chance to buy it on Amazon too before the stock extinguishes.