The first orders for the Steam Deck will start shipping on Friday, but Valve also said that the Dock that increases a lot of functionalities in the Steam Deck won’t be available at that time. Valve said that they were looking forward to getting the official Dock for the Steam Deck in customers’ hands soon, and they did say there was not going to be happening as early as they wanted, but they are excited to talk more about it soon and they are also planning to make them available in late spring this year.

According to Valve, “The official dock props up your Steam Deck while connecting to external displays, wired networking, USB peripherals, and power, it’s also not necessary to use the Dock as you can also use a powered USB-C hub if you’ve got one lying around,” according to the company.

Pairing up the Steam Deck with the dock Won’t improve the performance of the device according to Valve’s FAQ page, so it doesn’t sound as if your games will run better if you play them while docked. Docking is more like plugging a USB-C hub into a PC. Steam Deck always runs at full performance in portable mode.

Valve provides a reminder about the order rollout for the launch of this device and they will also send emails to the first batch of reservation holders for the device at 1:00 PM Eastern Time on Friday 25th.

You can just go ahead and check the website if you want to know their estimate for when you will be able to buy this dock.