It’s 2023 and there’s still absolutely no sign of Valve dropping the Steam Deck in Australia either on its own, or through a retailer such as EB Games like it has in the past with the Valve Index. That hasn’t stopped retailers such as Catch, Kogan, Dick Smith and Amazon’s marketplaces importing units and selling them in Australia.
Now, if you’re wanting to buy a Steam Deck officially through Valve’s US store, you can do that and get it shipped here, but the prices on the Australian retailers that we’ve mentioned are quite comparable to the point that I’m not sure if it’d be worth it anymore.
In terms of warranty etc, you’ll need to look with each specific retailer what their policy is given that these are obviously international units. It’s important to note that these are likely independent marketplace sellers that are selling on these retailers, so look into feedback etc.
If you’re buying from Valve’s online store and using a postage forwarder, (you’ll need to use a VPN and a US credit card), you’ll be paying roughly $650 shipped for the 64GB Model, $850 for the 256GB model and roughly $1000 (but beware of the GST surcharge over $1,000 for the 512GB version, so honestly, the ability to just buy it from one of the below Australian retailers and have it ship within a day or two (locally) would be what I’d be doing.
I look forward to hopefully seeing a few more Steam Decks out in the wild in Australia over the coming weeks, and it’ll be interesting to see if we do get an official release soon.