After ordering on 16th to Finland, mine was finally to be delivered today to a parcel locker in a store.

Obviously the machine was full and the parcel was rerouted hours ago, and has not arrived.

Sigh.

Guess I might just order a new one and get it delivered faster.

100% with you there, the shitshow has definitely given a hit to the excitement.

Even just giving longer initial delivery estimates would’ve given a better experience. Now folks, myself included, have just been antsy and later disappointed that the estimates do not seem to hold.

This is just an old man shouting at a cloud, but I can’t remember a worse purchasing experience.

Started attempting to order when the bloody thing went live, only got through after almost an hour of trying, supposedly only because folks noticed PayPal is screwed but a direct card payment worked smoothly. It appears this was in vain anyway, as the stuff isn’t even being shipped in order, with folks with orders earlier than mine still not having any movement and also folks ordering literal days later already having got theirs.

Then a package sits at a warehouse for days before being pick up by the literal slowest logistics company in business today. They’ve apparently managed to move it from the Netherlands to somewhere outside a Danish warehouse in the time it took earlier this year for DHL to ship a goddamn electric bike by lorry from Germany to me in Finland. I’ve got no ETA for when I might get the Deck, and the latest update is just that it’s left a warehouse in another country couple of days earlier.

As a consumer there isn’t really a way for me to vote with my wallet for a better experience. Sure, I could get another device, but I would not get one of the Windows handhelds, as what’s appealing here is the tight integration with Steam running on Linux. Like many, I would’ve happily paid extra for better and more predictable shipping, but Valve doesn’t even bother offering that.

This is truly a privileged first world problem that affects me in no real way, but for the price of the device and all the money I’ve spent on Steam over more than a decade, I would want to ask for better, but apparently I can’t.