A father says Valve has earned his business for life after replacing his ruined Steam Deck case for free.
Reddit user AHappyGummyWormx shared an image of a what he says is a conversation he had with Valve support following an accident in which his newborn child vomited all over his official Steam Deck case. The disgruntled parent says he preferred the official Steam Deck case that's included with the handheld console over the third-party ones you can get at the store, and so he pinged Valve support to see if they'd allow him to purchase a new one. As it turns out, they did him one better and automatically sent out a replacement case without even being asked.
"Valve has a customer for life," says HappyGummy. "Messaged support hoping to buy a new case and this is the response I got from support."
In the attached image, you can see HappyGummy asking Steam's support desk if he could buy a replacement case and receiving a personalized response reading: "We've submitted an order to have a Steam Deck 512GB OLED Case replacement part sent out to you." The email gave a 3-4 day processing estimate and said a separate tracking email would be arriving shortly.
Valve has a customer for life from r/SteamDeck
Assuming this story is true, and by all indications it seems to be, this is taking customer service to a whole new level. Valve had absolutely no obligation to send out a free case when the original was ruined due to user error (as much as I sympathize with any new parent), and in fact wasn't even asked to give away anything for free, but did so anyway.
Of course, while Valve is a historically user-friendly company, it's impossible to talk about anything Steam Deck-related without mentioning the recent price hike that took the most expensive version to almost $1000. With that in mind, a free Steam Deck case seems like a very low-price PR win for Valve, whether or not it was intended as such.
