Are you in the Q3 group of Steam Deck pre-orders and waiting for the handheld PC to be delivered to your doorstep for what seems like an eternity? You won’t have to wait much longer, as Valve announced in a tweet on the Steam Deck Twitter account that it is accelerating production of the Steam Deck and will double the number of shipments starting next week.
The announcement comes as Valve wraps up on sending reservation emails to customers in the Q2 group. The company said that those in the Q3 group should expect their reservation email to hit their inboxes starting on June 30.
Hello! Some great news on the production front. We just sent the last batch of Q2 emails, and we’ll start sending Q3 reservation emails on the 30th.
Production has picked up, and after today we'll be shipping more than double the number of Steam Decks every week! pic.twitter.com/kAHE0zRrV7
— Steam Deck (@OnDeck) June 27, 2022
It’s difficult to calculate how many Steam Decks will be shipped out when Valve said that it would “more than double the number” of shipments. Valve’s UX designer Lawrence Yang clarified in a response to The Verge writer Sean Hollister that the company was shipping a certain amount of Steam Deck units per week in the past. Whatever that amount was, Valve will be sending twice that much.
Since the release of the Steam Deck in February, Valve has been shipping out the handheld PC system slowly and in groups to offset the supply chain issues caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Even so, it’s been met with the highest critical acclaim among PC gamers. Not only does it play most of the games in the Steam library well (depending on its Steam Deck Verified status), but it can also run emulated games designed for other consoles, provided you install an emulator designed specifically for Steam Deck.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.