Valve Warns Gamers About Buying ‘Unofficial’ Steam Decks

Valve felt it necessary to start 2023 with a warning for anyone deciding to purchase a Steam Deck from an “unofficial” website or retailer.

Currently, there are only two official ways in which a Steam Deck can be purchased. The first is directly from Steam(Opens in a new window) if you live in the US, Canada, UK, or the EU. For gamers in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Honk Kong, Valve selected Komodo as its retail partner.

The Steam Deck Twitter account published a tweet(Opens in a new window) this week reminding everyone that “Steam Decks sold via any other websites or retailers are unofficial – please be careful.” This suggests Valve has either received a few complaints regarding Steam Decks purchased through other means, or isn’t happy with the amount of “unofficial” purchases being made.

The problem is, until Valve decides to officially sell the Steam Deck in more countries, gamers in those countries have little choice but to purchase through an “unofficial” website or retailer. This is highlighted in the replies to the Steam Deck tweet, with users asking when Steam Deck would be launched in key markets such as Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, or Mexico. Twitter users Ricardo Bonfim sums up the situation in a tweet(Opens in a new window) by simply stating, “if you don’t sell in LATAM, then we have no choice.”

Valve ended the Steam Deck waitlist back in June last year, announced(Opens in a new window) orders would ship immediately in October, and even gave away a Steam Deck every minute during The Game Awards in December. So clearly there’s plenty of stock available, which begs the question as to why the handheld isn’t being made available officially in more countries around the world?

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