If you pre-ordered the 512GB Steam Deck at launch, you may receive it sooner than expected. In fact, it could ship up to three months earlier than currently listed on your pre-order slip.

Now, before we get too excited about this, it's important to point out that it could still be almost a year before we get our hands on the sweet, sweet PC game. However, the fact that Valve has attracted the prospect of making one of its SKUs available remains a positive event.

Just as when pre-orders for the Steam deck first opened, some long-term Steam account holders were locked out for being too new and the servers had a mild meltdown due to high demand, the top-of-the-line version of the Steam deck has a availability date of 2022 quickly shifted from Q1 to Q3 2022.

That ETA remained intact until yesterday. During one of our intercontinental PC Gamer power meetings, we were casually checking on previously distressed availability in both the US and the UK, and found that things are actually getting better. It could be better for the quarter as well, basically shipping three months early. [Both the 64GB eMMC and 256GB SSD versions have remained at the same level as in Q2 2022 since the start of full-scale pre-orders.

So what has happened to make the 512GB Steam Deck available sooner? the first is the most trivial, a simple miscalculation in the reservation system itself. Perhaps they were too conservative in their estimates for users who might have purchased the large Steam Deck.

Another option is that Valve underestimated the popularity of the top SKUs and pre-allocated production capacity to place more weight on the bottom two Decks. And now, by distributing the manufacturing supply chain more evenly among the three SKUs, they have made it possible to ship more potential 512GB versions sooner.

The last option is that Valve increased their manufacturing orders to supply more hardware in the midst of the global chip shortage and simply produce more Decks. We contacted Valve to see if we could find out why this happy situation had arisen.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the end result is the same. You may get that high-end Steam deck you have your heart set on sooner than you thought. Lucky you.