Valve shows off a variety of Steam Deck prototypes

Pierre-Loup Griffis, a member of the Steam Deck team of Valve, announced a number of Steam Deck prototypes developed since 2019. 

As part of the Asia launch press event, we made the design lab into a showroom of development history. My favorite are the playable prototypes: bootable Deck family tree from mid-2019 to now, from a couple of hand-built units onto gradual mass production. pic.twitter.com/TpU5I8D50p

— Pierre-Loup Griffais (@Plagman2) September 12, 2022

As you can see from the picture, Valve's Steam Deck has undergone several design changes from a hand-crafted prototype to a gradually mass-produced version, including improvements in overall shape, color matching, button layout, touchpad shape, and more.

Griffais also showed a video of the Steam Deck prototype running SteamOS and Half-Life 2 (Half-Life 2). The prototype is powered by an  AMD  Picasso APU, which has half the GPU performance of the production custom Aerith APU.

In addition, Valve has prepared an oversized Steam Deck model for the 2022 Tokyo Game Show, which looks close to two people tall. It is still under construction, and the screen in the middle is expected to be usable.

Valve previously announced that Steam Deck will be released in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong later this year, and pre-orders have been opened in these four regions. The starting price of the Hong Kong version of Steam Deck is  3,288 Hong Kong dollars (about 2,827.68 yuan), the starting price of the Taiwan version is 13,380 Taiwan dollars (about 3,023.88 yuan), and the starting price of the Japanese version is 59,800 yen (about 3,019.9 yuan). ), the Korean version starts at 589,000 won (about 3,039.24 yuan).

In order to cooperate with the landing of these major markets, Steam Deck officially announced the launch of a special edition mascot Pal , an anthropomorphic Steam Deck handheld image with Valve's iconic valve on his head. Valve said that Pal means "companion" and "friend" in English.

Introducing a special version of our Steam Pal mascot, created for our launch in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong! https://t.co/Do1D9QPqfr

— Steam Deck (@OnDeck) September 9, 2022