Valve when they opened pre-orders for the Steam Deck

Damn. Thought they launched something new.

Shit, sorry. I was thinking about the OG steam deck preorders.

Edit: To be fair, this is in the shitposting community and I didn't intend to fool anyone. I just loved this ancient meme and wanted to have somewhat recent relevance.
- Little late to the party, aren't we?
Fixed.

I remember when that was the valve servers on any day of the week ending in "Y".

Good old green design. I miss the Counter Strike 1.6 days.
- The deck has the oldschool green design as a keyboard overlay style, and you can use Decky and CSS Loader to mod the rest of steam to look like that, and you can even find KDE themes that look like that.

I mean...

Not to take anything away from the Steam Deck, it's a very cool piece of hardware, but the Switch 2 beat its lifetime sales in what? Three weeks? I'm not even saying it's better, but I think people should get a sense of the scope of PC handhelds in general compared to consoles and the Switch specifically. And I say that as the owner of multiple handhelds, the Deck included.

Not to take anything away from the Steam Deck, it’s a very cool piece of hardware, but the Switch 2 beat its lifetime sales in what?

I'm pretty sure they're doing OK with regards to percentage of units sold/manufactured, especially given they are not doing a worldwide release, and are selling direct to consumer instead of to stores.
- Weirdly so is Nintendo these days.
  
  In any case I'm not sure what "percentage of units sold/manufactured" implies there. Everybody has some stock of their products. Selling through your stock isn't much of a metric unless you're doing limited runs on purpose. If Valve was selling these faster they'd manufacture them faster.
I don't even think I can put into words how much I would not buy a system that can be bricked remotely by the company I bought it from.
- Cool. But that's not the conversation we're having an five-ish million people clearly don't share that concern.
I mean... Yes. It's a niche market but I'm still glad that niche market exists 🤷‍♂️

I don't think they're really competitors to the extent that their form factor similarity would suggest

It's very possible I don't really understand the point you're making (which doesn't make it invalid or anything, I just don't know that I follow)
- I am very glad it exists. I may have a problem with owning handhelds. I am the perfect mark for this stuff. I have multiple upcoming boutique handheld PCs I'm actively trying not to overspend on.
  
  But they are competitors. If anything, they are about as similar as they've ever been, honestly.
  
  I'm only reacting to they weird Valve mythmaking that presents them as being extremely successful in the meme up top. Yes, the Deck is a very popular PC handheld, it is supposed to account for half-ish of the entire segment and it's been very well priced for what it is, but it isn't a runaway hit in the large scheme of the game industry and game hardware manufacturing.
For consoles in general Sony and Nintendo are the top dogs, no question, but I remember refreshing the pre order page over and over, got my order in about 10 minutes and was still placed in wave 3. I think scalpers are also largely responsible for both the Steam Deck and Switch sales, as I know no one IRL who has either and most of my friends are nerds.
- Are you from the US ? I procrastinated my preorder and did it a week after they opened them, and I think I got in wave 2 (western Europe).
- I forget what wave I was on. I know I wasn't there day one, but it also wasn't that long of a wait.
  
  My best guess is Valve was making very few of these. It's pretty impressive that Nintendo has been able to move this many consoles while keeping stock up, but Valve was clearly not operating at that volume for both cost reasons and to create some hype.
  
  For the record, I do own both a Switch 2 and a Deck. It wasn't that hard to get either, but the Switch 2 was available on day one in a way the Deck was not.

you gotta pay somehow for the customer service death squad