Steam Deck reservations open and it's already plagued with bugs and scalpers

What you need to know

• Reservations for the Steam Deck, a handheld gaming device developed by Valve, are now open in some territories.
• As with preorder systems for other high-end hardware, these reservations are currently plagued by numerous issues.
• You may encounters crashes, glitches and bugs attempting to reserve a unit, while scalpers have already begun jacking up prices on auction websites like eBay.

Reservations for the Steam Deck, Valve's upcoming gaming handheld device, opened on Friday. While some have been able to successfully reserve a place in the queue, quite a few potential owners haven't been so lucky.

The official Steam platform (the only place to buy the Steam Deck from a proper source) is seeing numerous crashes, bugs and glitches, giving users a warning that their Steam accounts are too new, or asking them to wait because they've made too many purchases in the past. Sometimes the page won't load at all or you'll get grayed out boxes with the message, " Reservations Servers are busy, please try again."

These kinds of issues aren't necessarily unique, as anyone who has been trying to buy an Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PS5 or a new GPU can attest to. The flood of traffic means that getting an order confirmed this early on can simply come down to being lucky.

While this isn't universal, some users are seeing queue sizes. Pavel Djundik, creator of Steam Database, noticed queues numbering in the thousands across multiple regions.

Naturally, scalpers with confirmed orders have already taken to websites such as eBay, with ludicrously overpriced orders of $2,000 for a Steam Deck.

We're seeing somewhat consistent success with users that don't overclick, even if the website stalls for a time, which may help you get an order through.

Users with newer accounts (or who get the error) can try again on July 18.

Additionally, with reservations now open, we can see order availability. The 64GB model and the 256GB model are expected to ship in Q1 2022 while the 512GB model is expected in Q2.