Valve gave away one Steam Deck per minute during The Game Awards, prompting memes, needless chat spam, and now, another giveaway. Valve has pulled from TGA viewers yet again to hand out 171 more Decks, all because it was "blown away by the overwhelming response" to the first.
This is for those who missed out on the first round, meaning that only those who signed up, watched the stream, and were elligible managed to get that second chance to win a Deck for free (thanks, ComicBook.com).
But that doesn't mean winners got second Decks. It's a one Deck system. And these aren't the lowest tier Decks, either, but the 512 GB model, which many have started to share in the comments with frantic excitement, as plenty thought the second round was fake until seeing the official Steam Deck tweet embeded below.
The Steam Deck has been a surprising hit for Valve, continuing its more recent trend of hardware success with the HTC Vive and VR Index. But it wasn't always sunshine and roses - Valve has had skin in the tech game for a while now, but a lot of these older projects got shelved fast. One in particular, the Steam Controller, was later repurposed into the Deck, but interestingly enough, Valve isn't done with it yet.
It has expressed an interest in making a new Steam Controller, learning from the mistakes of the first. Whether this desire becomes reality remains to be seen, but with a docked Steam Deck, a controller to go hand-in-hand wouild make perfect sense given that you can't snap the controller off the side like you can with a Nintendo Switch.