A special prototype of the Steam Deck was sold on eBay: Officially, these models are not allowed to be sold, but such devices keep appearing on eBay and other relevant platforms.
A prototype of the Steam Deck was just sold on eBay. This was reported by the English-speaking magazine PCGamesN. The completed listing on eBay itself can still be viewed. The seller writes:
- It appears to be an early revision with no operating system installed. However, a 256 GB NVMe SSD is installed.
- The left touchpad is loose.
- The two wires for the vibration feedback are said to have been disconnected.
- It only boots to the BIOS; no operating system is preinstalled.
- The seller has not conducted further tests.
According to eBay, the prototype was listed for $2,999 and was later sold for $2,000. The source of the device for the seller is unknown.
Clear differences to the official Steam Deck
What differences are there compared to the Steam Deck? While the basic layout is still recognizable as a Steam Deck, there are some fundamental differences between this alleged prototype and the final Steam Deck:
- Some of the buttons are blue instead of the entirely black buttons of the official product.
- The touchpads are round and not square. This resembles the original Steam controller.
- The buttons on the back of the prototype are flat, while they arch around the grips on the finished Steam Deck.
- The sides of the prototype also bulge outwards in significant protrusions, while the side edges of the final Steam Deck are straight.
- The ventilation openings are also located at the top of the base in the technical sample, while they are mounted at the bottom of the base in the finished design.
- The joysticks on the front seem to be smaller on this alleged prototype as well.
PCGamesN also reports that the device in the photos resembles a device that was shown in a post on X (formerly Twitter) by “Valve Steam Deck Coder” Pierre-Loup Griffais at that time. He stated that it contains a Picasso APU from AMD with “about half the GPU power of the final deck.” This also suggests that it is likely a very early model of the Steam Deck.
The Steam Deck and other handhelds remain very popular among gamers to this day. Now, a market research institute has published figures that show: The most successful model to date is still the Steam Deck: We finally know how many times the Steam Deck has been sold: Valve’s handheld has far surpassed Asus ROG Ally and the remaining competitors
