Steam Deck shipments start February 28 - here's how reservations work

The final Steam Deck release date is set for February 28, sort of. 

Valve announced the handheld's updated launch in a new blog post. An initial wave of order emails will be sent "shortly after" 10 am PST / 1 pm EST / 6pm BST on February 25 in the same order that pre-orders were received, so it will still be a first come, first served system. Customers will have 72 hours from the time they receive their email to lock in a reservation among the first shipment of units; otherwise, their spot will be passed to the next person. 

So while Valve says the Steam Deck is launching on February 25, the actual shipments won't begin until February 28. Valve says new batches of order emails will be sent out "on a weekly cadence" going forward. 

These reservation emails are just a follow-up to initial purchases; you can't modify your order at this stage. You can only order the Steam Deck model that you reserved in the first place, and as Valve explains, "your reservation deposit will be applied to the final price of Steam Deck, and shipping costs are included."

This news comes just under two weeks after Valve committed to a February launch for the handheld, which was previously delayed out of December. The Steam Deck is just barely beating the buzzer ahead of March, and that only goes for the first shipment, but the system will still be going out to users next month. Obviously, a lot of people likely won't get their hands on the thing for a few weeks or even months, but at least it will finally be out in the wild. 

Valve recently unveiled Steam Cloud Sync, which will let users switch between their PC and Steam Deck seamlessly.