What appears to be a very early Steam Deck sample has apparently been snapped on eBay for two grand, and it looks quite different from the gaming handheld we know and love today. For a start, there’s a flash of color, with some blue on a few of the buttons, rather than the all-black final version. The touchpads are also circular, rather than square, much like the ones on the original Steam controller for desktop PCs.
The end result of Valve’s R&D efforts, the acclaimed Steam Deck, has gone on to become the best gaming handheld you can buy right now. Valve put a load of work into making the device easy to use, though, and will have made several prototypes. According to a badge on the base of the unit, we’re looking at engineering sample number 34. The badge also clearly says “not for resale,” and we can already see how that worked out.
The listing itself has now disappeared, but there’s a screenshot of it on SteamDeckHQ, which shows the original asking price was $2,999.99. Meanwhile, over on the Reddit r/SteamDeck channel, a user called Gary_the_mememachine also shared some of the images of it. You can still find a summary of the listing by searching on auction site aggregators, such as 130Point (as shown at the bottom of the image below), which shows that the device has now sold for $2,000.
One of the photos shows the BIOS of the system, which reveals it having 8GB of DDR4 memory, compared to 16GB of LPDDR5 in the final version, and the listing also says it has 256GB of storage. The device in the photos looks very similar to the one shared in a post on X (formerly Twitter) by Valve Steam Deck coder Pierre-Loup Griffais, which he said contained a Picasso APU, with “about half of the GPU power of the final Deck.”
Picasso was based on AMD’s Vega GPU architecture, which had 192-704 stream processors, depending on the configuration, and came out before AMD’s first RDNA chips, with no ray tracing capabilities.
While the basic layout is still recognizable as a Steam Deck, there are some fundamental differences between this alleged prototype and the final Steam Deck. The buttons on the back of the prototype are flat, for example, compared to the ones that curve around the grips on the finished Steam Deck. The prototype also curves outwards at the sides in big bulges, while the side edges of the end Steam Deck are straight.
The air vents are also at the top of the base in this engineering sample, compared to the bottom of the base on the finished design. The joysticks on the front also appear to be smaller on this alleged prototype, although the button layout is otherwise very similar to the finished design, but with a few different-shaped buttons.
It could be a fake, of course, but this looks legitimate to me. Valve has previously issued pictures of its prototype Steam Decks, as seen in its Steam Deck booklet, and this alleged prototype has similarly shaped and colored buttons to the one circled in the image from the booklet below.
Apparently there isn’t even an OS installed on this prototype, but the similar machine shared in Pierre-Loup Griffais’s X post is shown to be able to boot into SteamOS and run Half-Life 2, so it’s possible this machine’s new owner may even be able to play some games on it, as well as owning a little piece of gaming history.
If you own a standard, non-prototype Steam Deck, check out our guide to the best Steam Deck games to find some new titles to play, as well as our guide to the best Steam Deck dock if you’re looking to hook up your deck to other devices.
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