Valve will finally sell the Steam Deck in Australia

Shoutout to Unlucky Steve who made this happen by paying $1000 to get one from the US a few minutes before the announcement.

Luckily we've had grey imports for a while that were pretty much only a few $100 more.
- I got lucky and only paid a bit more than RRP, but you pretty much had to sit around and wait for a deal.
- "a few hundred more" for a device that only costs a few hundred to begin with seems a rather hefty premium to pay, and calling that "lucky".

My Aussie friends didn't have the steam deck?!?

We were playing on a rooted Gameboy Color.
- They actually play Game boy with CRT monitor
They're not hard to get, but you would pay $1200 AUD instead of $899 which is the retail for the 512GB OLED, for example.
- Been telling folks for ages I'm not getting a steamdeck until I can give my money direct to valve.
I'm Australian living in Australia and thought we had it.

I've met people with them and didn't once get the impressions they were hard to get
- hard to get no but not easy either
There are unofficial imports, but they cost more and you don't get Valve's great warranty coverage.

My partner bought me one a few months ago from Kogan for my birthday. But it does have a problem which needs to be RMA’d and I knew there was no hope of that.

I thought we could try our luck with Kogan returns, but they only have the OLED model now so don’t know how that would go. Especially as it appears to work fine ( until you get 5 - 10 minutes in-game then it hard crashes).

I found on the github issue tracker for steamOS someone from Brazil (who also had to resort to grey imports) found a way to flashback to an older BIOS and adjust memory power settings. That fixed it, but it’s a bit bodgy and introduces other issues.

This is a known issue that the Steam rep on the issue tracker said only follow that process if you absolutely can’t RMA it. They closed the issue in the basis that you just RMA it if it happens.

What was the issue?
- I tried to find the github issue, but it’s eluding me, so I’m going to go into detail since I spent about 3 weeks troubleshooting this.
  
  Hard crash when playing a game. Restarts steam deck with a “verifying installation” message.
  
  This happens anywhere from 2-15 minutes of playtime. Game didn’t matter, Terraria, Skyrim, Borderlands 1, Dave the Diver, Shredders Revenge, Doom 2016 … It was also reported by users with both LCD and OLED decks, so hardware revision didn’t matter either.
  
  Anecdotally you find people saying that some of these steps work:
  
  Memory retraining, re-imaging steam deck, Flashing different bios versions, Messing around with gpu clocks
  
  But almost all of those threads loop back to the OP saying something like “nope, still crashing”. Any reprieve they did have seemed to be coincidental.
  
  Valve themselves recommend those first two steps and then an RMA if it doesn’t fix it.
  
  A Brazilian user in the issue tracker worked out you can flash BIOS 0116, and disable two specific memory power management flags. I believe the settings are hidden in other versions of the BIOS.
  
  A Valve rep on the tracker confirmed that would work, but suggested not to do it as the deck is not functioning properly and needs to be replaced. They then closed the issue and advised to only use that fix if you can’t RMA.
  
  Worth noting, 0116 is a pre-OLED BIOS, and can only be flashed to the LCD models. There is no way to reveal these BIOS flags on the OLED model, so you can only RMA in that case.
  
  This has absolutely solved the problem. But I think I’m having a few dodgy side effects that weren’t happening before, like updates failing, and USB connection has become iffy and needing a few restarts to recognise devices are plugged in.
  
  At least I can play games again, which work flawlessly now.
- This one https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/1257
  
  Had it as well. I'm actually not sure if I still have it. Crashes became less frequent after the RMA but they still happen. And if they do start happening again they get more frequent until I do a cold reboot.

What the hell is an Australia? Is that like a German Best Buy or something?

Like that, but with more swearing, and spiders, so many spiders
- Its 5 meters from my back door to my car, I ran through 5 spider webs walking to my car this morning, the last one right at my car door.
I thought it was a German ski resort.
Hey, this time it's not on us!
It's the Brits' fault.
- Britain 2: Electric Boganloo

Yay!

Does NZ count as Australia too? Or are we stuck with parallel importers, or picking one up on holiday?

Not if you keep pronouncing “deck” like that!
- Steam Dick hahahaha
they're in the Au constitution any time they feel like accepting nuclear subs in port ...

Feels like delaying this so long was a very bad financial decision considering how absurdly priced games are in Australia. Console players are far more likely to pony up the multiple hundo buckaroos for a launch game with all the day one dlc than people who can comprehend a computer as a gaming platform.

Finally, about time.

Now we need South Africa and Brazil