Steam Deck store page outage sparks silent discontinuation rumors

Recently, the official store page of the Steam Deck had a small hiccup where it redirected to the main Steam homepage for a short time. Naturally, people jumped into conclusions as to Valve quietly retiring the handheld. This event is notable for causing some confusion among potential buyers and current owners as to whether the OLED variant of the Steam Deck was still in production or not. Thankfully, the store page is back to normal, confirming that 512GB and 1TB variants of the OLED Steam Deck are still for sale.

Store page restoration confirms OLED models remain in production

Valve has not put out any official statement as to why the store page went down in the first place. We don't know if it was some kind of technical mistake or if it was a sneaky marketing teaser. All we have is Valve being radio silent on the issue, letting people speculate about the future of the Steam Deck OLED series.

Looking at the Wayback Machine, we see that there is a gap in the log on the 30th of October. However, there were live instances of the store page from November 1st to November 3rd. So the store pages of the products were up during the relevant timeframe, debunking the idea that it's been unavailable for weeks. Also, the short span of unavailability implies that it was likely a minor technical issue, not the outright discontinuation of the product.

We've been following the Steam Deck space pretty closely, with previous coverage regarding some battery optimization plugins. Although this wasn't related to the actual hardware, it's notable in the sense that having access to the store is key to knowing if something is available or not. Luckily the store page is back and there's no longer any lingering doubt in that regard, be it for potential buyers or existing owners.

Source: NotebookCheck