Steam Deck restocks or a pile of Steam Frames and Machines? Either way, Valve's been importing a whole heap of 'game consoles'

With the vast majority of PC components, laptops, handheld devices and full-blown consoles all made in China and various SE Asian countries, the fact that the biggest gaming vendors regularly import stuff is hardly newsworthy. But when the vendor in question is Valve, and the items being shipped over are registered as 'games consoles', that brings up two intriguing possibilities, and one of them is especially exciting.

It was Brad Lynch on X who noticed that Valve's warehouses have been "receiving a ton of 'game consoles'" and a quick check on NBD Data, a service that tracks global trade data, shows that there has indeed been a fair amount of recent shipments of said devices.

The obvious question to ask here is just what exactly are these 'game consoles'? One clear possibility is that Valve has just had a nice shipment of Steam Decks, which will be good news for anyone who has been waiting to get their hands on one (they've been out of stock for ages).

Perhaps less likely but possibly more interesting is that the shipments could be a big pile of Steam Frame VR headsets or even Steam Machines. After all, it would seem a little odd that Valve would be happy to launch the Steam Controller, but then wait many months before offering the devices it was announced alongside.

I should imagine that Valve had originally planned to release all three—Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller—at pretty much the same time, but with the immense squeeze on the supply of DRAM and SSDs driving prices stratospheric, the Gabecube has become something of a poisoned chalice now.

Valve can't afford to just leave them in warehouses, partly finished, until memory prices come back down, but at the same time, if it releases them now with a much higher price tag than originally planned, sales are likely to be distinctly…well…awful. But since both options result in the same outcome (i.e. a very unhappy chief financial officer), I guess Valve could well be thinking 'Ah sod it, let's ship 'em'.

My gut feeling is that these recent shipments are a mixture of Steam Decks and Steam Frames, rather than a big pile of Steam Machines, but since I have all the predictive powers of a sun-dried earthworm, when it comes to tech, the wobbling of my innards means diddly squat.

Steam Decks, Steam Frames, Steam Machines: It doesn't really matter what's actually in all those boxes (cue Brad Pitt), because the good news is that there's a whole pile of Valve goodies waiting to be snapped up. If I had the pennies, I'd be first in line for a shiny new Frame, myself.