Funny how every comment so far has completely missed the point. The “experiment” isn’t whether people want different colorways. Indeed, that’s already known from other products on the market and the third party market for the Steam Deck. The experiment is in seeing how sustainable it is for Valve to produce them. Right now, every Deck is virtually the same. There are three models, but they’re positioned rather intentionally to sell roughly in the same or at least predictable quantities.

That all changes with something completely aesthetic, like a colorway. There’s no way to know how many people will want a clear vs solid black shell. When you introduce actual colors, things get even more complicated. How many people want blue vs green vs purple vs red, etc. Add in the X factor of choice of model, and it becomes a nightmare. Maybe a purple LCD sells well, but no one wants a purple 1TB OLED.

Valve is being smart here. They want to start offering options for people to get a look they really want for their Decks, but they’re starting small with one limited colorway, to see how it is to manufacture, manage stock, etc. They’ll likely start to slowly introduce more options, getting an feel for it as they expand. Eventually, you may be able to get a Deck in every color of the rainbow, but they’d be absolutely insane to do that overnight. THAT is the experiment.