Don’t have a Steam Deck yet? No worries. Valve might give you one for free!
On December 8, during the Game Awards, the maker of the Steam Deck Valve will be giving away the most expensive version of the Steam Deck, with 512GB, every minute to viewers of the livestream event.
If you want to be one of those lucky viewers, all you’ll need to do is head to the link we’ve attached in the description, sign into Steam, and then hit register now. Then, on December 8th, you must watch the Game Awards livestream via Steam— yes, Steam does livestreaming if you didn’t know— to be in with a chance of winning one.
Considering that last year, the length of the Game Awards rivaled the runtime of one of the Lord of the Rings movies, Valve is set to give away hundreds of devices.
And even if you have a Steam Deck already, you should register anyway because A) who doesn’t need a second Steam Deck? and B) everyone who registers gets a very cute Steam Pal digital sticker.
Of course you’ll be wanting to pick up a Steam Deck to replace your Switch because the technical issues of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have pushed you to the brink. But don’t retire that nearly 6 year old handheld just yet, because in an extremely rare acknowledgement by Nintendo, it seems that the game might actually be getting some fixes.
The game just got its first patch since launch, and will make some additions as well as address some issues. Ranked battling is coming to the game’s battle stadium, and there have been some bug fixes, including a bug where the music during the game’s Elite Four confrontations wouldn’t play correctly.
As for what the additional bug fixes are, who knows what exactly what has been mended in this patch, but some of the biggest ones include massive frame rate drops, pop in at extremely close distances, invisible legendaries, and clipping through environments, but it sounds like some, if not all of these problems, will be addressed.
In addition to the patch notes, Nintendo stated that, “We are aware that players may encounter issues that affect the games’ performance. Our goal is always to give players a positive experience with our games, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We take the feedback from players seriously and are working on improvements to the games.”
A statement like this is almost unheard of from the gaming giant. Considering its rarity, as well as the fact that Scarlet and Violet have been Nintendo’s fastest selling games ever, the breadth of issues, as well as the volume of players pointing them out, must be immense.
