With the first shipments of Valve's portable Steam Deck now in the hands of players in a few select regions (sadly, not Australia) a new interview with Valve designer Lawrence Yang (via IGN) highlights plans to significantly ramp up production to meet demand. Sometime next-month it's expected that production will hit at least 200,000 units.

And it'll only increase from there. "We had to delay for supply chain reasons," says Yang. "Those continue to be issues, but we are surmounting them. We imagine that the launch is going to ramp, in production terms, it'll ramp very quickly. In the first month very quickly we'll be in the tens of thousands, by the second month we'll be in the hundreds of thousands. And beyond that it'll grow even quicker."

Currently there's a long wait-list for the Steam Deck on the account of it being a portable handheld that can play the bulk of your Steam Library. An enticing concept if there ever was one. And although early reviews have pointed to UI and driver issues (in that Windows drivers weren't available at launch) and other compatibility problems; the fact that it can play titles like God of War and Elden Ring and The Witcher III without any trouble is impressive to say the least.

With production set to ramp up considerably this news does give us hope that Steam Deck sales will be made available to Australia sooner rather than later. It took a long time for the Valve Index to make its Aussie debut so fingers crossed we're talking about a matter of months here.