HTML holes provide a glimpse of Steam Deck’s initial preorder numbers

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  Carrying case, which comes as part of the Steam Deck's pricier SKUs. [credit: Valve ]

Though Valve is fiercely protective of its PC game sales data, a rare HTML hole in its Steam service revealed apparently firm order numbers for the Steam Deck, the company's recently confirmed Switch-like portable gaming PC.

For the first 90 minutes of the system's preorder period earlier today-as limited to shoppers in North America, the UK, and the EU-Valve's database coughed up exact preorder numbers, thanks to "queue" metadata appearing in publicly viewable calls to the HTML version of Steam. During that time, SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik kept track of the sales tally, and by his count, the publicly reported queue for confirmed preorders exceeded 110,000 across those three sales regions.

Djundik's count was limited to Steam Deck's pricier SKUs, so the estimate doesn't account for sales of the cheapest, $399 version (which comes with 64GB of onboard storage). His count, as backed up by other users' image captures of sales data through the preorder period's first 90 minutes, boils down as follows:

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