Yup, Steam Deck pre-orders sure crashed the Steam store
Not that this comes as much of a surprise
Oh no, it looks like Steam's store is down. I wonder what could have—okay, yeah. This doesn't come as much of a surprise. Pre-orders for Valve's just-announced Steam Deck handheld PC just kicked off and it seems like maybe a few folks are interested in buying them. The Steam store often crashes after being flooded with eager deal seekers during its major sales. No surpise that pre-orders for their next big hardware attempt are bringing similar results.
Steam isn't entirely down. I have managed to get through to the main store page intermittently. I've even gotten through to the reservations page. Lucky me! Other folks are having a bit of a struggle though, according to Down Detector which is suddenly getting thousands of reports of Steam being down.
Once you get through, be warned that you may still have some hurdles. Graham has noticed that his eons old Steam account is apparently "too new" to make an early reservation. He's gotten the warning "Your account is too new to reserve early. Reservations will open for you on Sunday July 18th, 10am PDT."
That restriction is one of Valve's measures to prevent resellers from snapping up all the Steam Deck reservations. "We've added a requirement that the reserver has made a purchase on Steam prior to June 2021 for the first 48 hours of reservation availability," they previously explained.
Katharine's had success though, and I've gotten no such warning either now gotten the same warning both on desktop and in my Steam client. Whelp, congrats to Katharine in any case. Oh, and Graham's just gotten through as well.
If you too are having a bit of a struggle, here's your Steam Deck light reading in the meantime. Valve announced the Steam Deck just yesterday as their handheld and dockable PC machine. It'll do just about anything a PC does, they say, which seems to include installing mods for games. They are still working out some details with anti-cheat compatibility though, which could affect all you multiplayer folks.
If you're keen to try nabbing one yourself, you can reserve a Steam Deck over on Steam with a £4/$5 deposit. The units themselves start out at £349 / $399 for the base model with 64GB storage and up to £569 / $649 for the 512GB NVMe SSD version.