Valve recently raised the price on the Steam Deck, making the handheld gaming PC cost up to $949 for the 1TB OLED model. While that’s a massive $300 increase over its original price, the Steam Deck is once again sold out.
Not that surprising - somebody’s always willing to spend money they don’t have on stuff they don’t need.
$950 handheld gaming device that I’d only ever use on a plane or long ass road trip in which I’m not driving.
Or, play games on my phone.
OR, gasps read a goddamn book.
I use it mainly as a home media pc. I got it as a gift though.
This may be my pessimism talking, but I feel like PC and Console gaming are probably both going the same route as Disney Theme Parks. If you have to ask how much it costs… If you aren’t willing to blindly shell out too much for too little… Gaming won’t be for you anymore. When it boils down to it, these things are luxuries. They’ve found their latest “limited production” excuse (AI gobbling up SSD, GPU, and RAM production) to pump up cost and there’s definitely excess demand. Or at least enough scalpers willing to take that risk. Sure the cost spike will probably come back down some once the bubble pops, but if they keep selling out, then why would they ever lower the price again?
It’s definitely getting worse, but I feel like it won’t get that bad. I don’t think that the unaffordabiltiy of PC components will result in gaming becoming a niche commodity, I think it will result in people either not being able to play certain games, or not play them at the settings they want. I think gaming will persist via things like cheaper or used hardware. I think also some game developers will adjust the performance requirements of their games so that it meets (or attempts to meet) the reality of what people are able to buy. Triple A gaming might die tho if they don’t adapt.
It will shift to streaming that can run on anything and things like mods, running older clients, and cheats will essentially be impossible. Unless of course you pay for them with in app purchases, which publishers love
Short sighted consumers will eat it up because “oh now I don’t need an expensive console, I can just run an app on my tv!”
Then comes the death of all the above, as well as a generation of kids having access to not just gaming, but 3d modeling and serious digital art, programming (as well as learning through modding and finding ways to cheat), music production, video editing, etc. how many of those things were only available to kids via piracy? Capitalists don’t give a shit about this. They’re salivating at everything become a streaming client which both essentially eliminates piracy as well as turning a one time software purchase into perpetual subscription hell.
The crazy part is everyone but the tiniest sliver of people will be fucked by this. You know how musicians have shifted to basically making dick from streaming, and view it essentially as advertisement to funnel people into physical merch and concert ticket purchases, their only remaining revenue streams? Developers will be in the same place. It’s arguably advantageous now to be on something like gamepass but that’s because Microsoft is purposefully taking a small percentage barely above costs (10.5%). Once it’s dominant do you think they won’t shift to 30% like apple, steam, and google? And probably even more once distribution outside of their platform is unfeasible?
And for the short sighted consumer saving $3-500 on a console once every 5-10 years becomes another $30 subscription, which outpaces the cost of a console in 2 years and also robs you of the shred of autonomy you did have
Gaming in general has been going to the wayside. Time spent gaming nowadays is spent on social media and online forums like this one. I’m not saying gaming is dead or even that it’s remotely near that point (it will be still be around and thriving when I, a 17 year old, die) but coupled with the obscene prices, Gaming is not what it USED to be and it will be that way til something revolutionary comes…
People are now conditioned to need INSTANT GRATIFICATION FOR EVERYTHING ALWAYS!
“I want a Steam Deck! I can’t actually afford these new prices! I’m buying it anyways!”
Then retailers see the insane prices people pay for stuff without blinking. Steam Decks sell out after a 40% markup. RAM & SSDs & HDDs sell out at 4x what they sold for a year ago. So the prices never go back down.
And everyone goes full surprised-Pikachu-face when everything is now always goddamn expensive.
Show some fucking restraint for once, people!
Goddamn.
So the prices never go back down.
So, the bottleneck here is really the memory prices, and while Steam Deck sales do affect memory prices — as with anyone buying anything with memory — my guess is that it’s a pretty small factor relative to other devices using memory.
According to WP, the Steam Deck has 16GB and sold uh, 4 million units over its entire lifetime as of February this year. It’s been out for four years. So figure ~64 petabytes of DRAM over its lifetime, or ~16 petabytes of DRAM per year.
For comparison, in a single year, looking at smartphones:
https://wifihifi.com/1-25b-smartphone-units-produced-in-2025-apple-samsung-tied-for-tops/
1.25B Smartphone Units Produced in 2025, Apple & Samsung Tied for Tops
Global Smartphone Average DRAM Hits Record 8.4GB in 2025
8.4 GB is the per-phone average, including older phones, so this is probably a conservative estimate, but assume for 2025, that meant that phone manufacture consumed ~10,500 petabytes of DRAM in a single year.
EDIT: And I’m sure that AI consumers dwarf that, given announcements about how much OpenAI alone was buying 40% of global capacity.
EDIT2: And if one wants local LLMs — I’d like to run my LLMs locally, not have some cloud provider do it — and you assume maybe 1% capacity utilization, then we’re going to need something like 100 times what the cloud AI companies are getting in RAM to get to that point.
So, yeah, Steam Deck purchasers do count towards demand for memory, but…I don’t think that they likely move the needle all that much alone.
People are now conditioned to need INSTANT GRATIFICATION FOR EVERYTHING ALWAYS!
you haven’t read anything about credit cards and the 20th century, have you? how old are you? like 19?
I was 19 in the '90s.
When nobody paid $20 to have GrubHub deliver their $5 McDonalds order from down the street to their house.
you mean when people were so impatient that they spent money to call an actual person to demand a pizza delivery in under 30 mins, then demanded it was free if it was one minute late, and if it was on time, paid for it with a credit card that charged interest?
We tipped the delivery driver a few bucks for deliveries.
I’m saying that there weren’t businesses where the entire model was: “Pay 2-3x what this food’s worth in-store, and some rando will deliver it. They may even give you everything you ordered.”
As we have seen, they won’t and never will. This is arguing for gravity to stop pulling so hard.
The mechanism to fix the problem you’re describing has broken long ago and everyone stopped trying to fix it. Your money needs more choices of where to be spent, then businesses will force each other to price things reasonably. If anyone can name all the companies that make a type of product, then that is not enough companies.
I posit it’s a consumer culture issue.
Look at Temo, Tiktok, Amazon, YouTube; people are bombarded with “buy this on impulse!” every day, 24/7, through notifications. They’re urged to buy high by dozens of influencers they’re bombarded with.
So they do.
And now that’s the culture. Competition isn’t going to fix that, and doesn’t naturally arise in that kind of environment anyway.
I think that’s true. I think that stems from the fact that a large percentage of global consumption is American in origin, and since at least the Industrial Revolution, that country’s culture has been led around by the nose by business magnates to the point that our national culture has remained relatively shallow compared to other nations and is largely centered around buying things, as you point out.
Yep, you can’t fix stupid.
The thing is… I’m lucky enough to be able to afford all of this. In part, because I avoid terrible-value purchases. When the price of something goes up 40 to 400% percent, I say to myself, “Wow, it’d be really stupid to buy that thing RIGHT NOW.”
Too many people apparently lack that critical judgment, and just have FOMO in its place.
We don’t live in a progressive society that almost universally pans impulse buys, unfortunately.
People really underestimate how much money other people have. $950 is expensive, but there are so many people out there who can afford that.
Our economy has been running on debt for a long time now, and debt is a bottomless pit.
Also I speculate that these were almost definitely picked up mostly by scalpers.
PC and steam boys are pathetic. They all think Steam is THEIR corporation and Gabe is THEIR billionaire. Bunch of cultists
I got a Steam Deck LCD 64GB for $350 and then put a 1TB SSD in it, so like $430 total. I love the SD, but it’s just not worth double that. A gaming laptop with a 4050 goes for about $800 now, so the current pricing isn’t really that good of a deal even at today’s prices.
Can you share a link of that laptop? My sister in law needs a new gaming laptop but everything I’m finding is waaaaay more like expensive than that. Granted, she’s doesn’t live in the US so whatever retail you send me won’t work but if the laptop is cheap the same brand/model would probably be cheaper there.
I love the Steam Deck, but it’s definitely not worth $1000. That’s absolutely ridiculous. I guess I’m going to find a new hobby, gaming is becoming way too expensive.
There’s countless good games that work on older equipment. You could play for the rest of your life on just that slightly older stuff and not get through half of it.
Exactly. I’ve put more hours on my retro handheld playing ps1 and SNES games in the last year than I’ve spent on my desktop. It was $26, and I’ve hardly even dented the library it’s got.
Gaming can be very cheap, you dont need to spend thousands to start gaming, you need to in specific settings
Tell that to devs. Motherfucking Slay the Spire 2 runs like dogshit on my 1st-gen ROG Ally.
Most games do not need expensive hardware.
Last month I bought a retro handheld for 30 bucks. It can play all the existing catalogue of consoles up to PS1, and also pico8, tic-80, and small pc games via portainer.
I love retro gaming so much, and there are way more than enough games out there from decades past to last a lifetime. (This, of course, depends on continued availability to this library via unofficial channels.)
There also are a vast quantity of newer indie games which don’t require high end hardware. I’d love to see a renewed interest in smaller scale projects.
So glad I bought one in January
I’m so happy I got a white limited edition one off marketplace for 650 last week. Sold my LCD for 400 so it wasn’t a bad upgrade for the price.
Half these “sold out” stories don’t tell you if it was 500 units or 50. Supply was already a mess before the price hike … AI ate the RAM market and now everything downstream pays for it. The device is great, the timing is just bad.
I wonder if this just means the supply was really low.
Considering the current ebay pricing, it doesn’t really make sense for any scalper to buy it unless they think it will become some weird coveted collectors item.
Either way rip steam machine. I hope they continue to fund Proton and Lepton because it really made a massive impact for gaming on Linux.
There are millions of ‘gamers’ in the usa who are well off financially, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was a normal size shipment and people genuinely just were fiening for it
Honestly, the way shit is going, get what you can while you can. Gaming is only going to get worse and more expensive by the week.
a steal if you consider tomorrow’s prices
Im going to steal because I considered tomorrow prices
A lot of people going to be feeling that way which is why I’m done walking around with my Deck out.
But what about decks out for Harambe?
Put your deck away Waltuh
Trade one for a fidget Spinner!
Only if AI continues to ramp up.
We’re seeing a lot of cracks. I don’t know if any bubbles are going to burst, but the hype is far less common than the frustration these days.
On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of stories of people getting addicted to the “agentic harnesses” and personally (and happily) blowing through hundreds to thousands of dollars/month. I’ve seen people write articles about how their $200/month subscriptions are such a good deal, lol. Companies are forcing their employees to use AI at insane costs. Nearly every software engineering job posting mentions using AI tools as a requirement. Anthropic’s revenue is set to double this quarter and be its first profitable quarter (likely using a lot of accounting tricks).
I’m really curious if this AI industry can self-perpetuate itself with stupidity and greed indefinitely as everything becomes shittier and unreliable, and civilization slowly crumbles.
That’s the beginning of a bubble popping. Addicts and stupid people only have so much money. It runs out quicker than you’d think.
I would say it depends who you ask. Nvidia is all up for the hype. https://isaiprofitable.com/
Fuck NVidia. Wouldn’t use them with Linux anyway.
That is ok for NVidia, they don’t really want to sell to end users anymore. AI datacenters give way higher margins
When that falls through (and it will), they’ll try to come crawling back to retail.
Don’t let them.
only if they publicly fire and black ball huang
This is why I went ahead and bought one last January, It’ll probably last at least 5 years(i hope), and I can pirate and emulate games much more easily than on a console to keep my entertainment budget lower. Just a year early
I bought one at launch (not OLED though), it’s still going strong. They made a really solid device and if anything breaks (which hasn’t happened yet), it’s easy to replace. I used GeForce now for the first time this month and it was really smooth and it’s great the console doesn’t heat up with it.
That being said, I think it’s too expensive now…
Or maybe save some money because everything is going to get worse.
Is money going to hold its value? I’m debating on just stocking up on non perishable food and decent quality tools while I still can.
solid self-repairable or renowned long-lasting tools is my thinking. You can learn lots of basic plumbing and electrics in small doses
Sure. I guess it depends on your anticipated financial situation and your priorities.
What marketing agency wrote this? Dumb fucking idea. No one in the world needs Steam Deck and no company has ever responded to more sales with lower prices. Boycott that shit
Nobody needs any entertainment, but some people enjoy hobbies like gaming.
no company has ever responded to more sales with lower prices
Prices are going up rapidly thanks to AI data centers exploding demand by orders of magnitude more than retail customers. There is no end in sight to the price increases.
If you want a gaming device, buy it sooner rather than later. That’s all I am saying.
Is there not a future in which the AI bubble bursts, and we are in a glut of datacentre memory and storage with no buyers?
There should be a cataclysmic bottoming out of the market that leads to a period of cheap, abundant parts.
Is there not a future in which the AI bubble bursts, and we are in a glut of datacentre memory and storage with no buyers?
There is. Unfortunately, not even the chips on the memory used by data centers is compatible with consumer hardware. They use extremely high performance, expensive HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), we use DDR memory. Unless consumers start getting affordable devices that are compatible with such memory, there is not much hope of buying what has been or is in the process of being made for data centers.
What is life without entertainment? Do you think all what life is about is to barely make ends meet while making extra profit for the billionaire class? I even got told that I don’t even need healthy food, just be mindful how much I’m eating of the cheap unhealthy stuff, do some intermittent fasting, and eat apples as snack instead of sweets.
In a more perfect world: Philanthropic scalpers buy up Steam Decks to sell back to regular joes at previously low price, taking a loss on the sale.
Ain’t no world that perfect.
Did it sell out to actual individuals or did scalpers buy up a bunch?
I’m not a scalper so idk what is normal, but I wouldn’t think it would be smart to buy something $300 over face value in an attempt to resell it for more? Especially hardware that is already long in the tooth internally. Aaaand from Valve who typically has consistently restocked these over time.
Idk though maybe there is a market for $1300 SD OLED resellers 🤷♂️
Used Decks were priced very far above MSRP on Facebook Marketplace a couple weeks ago. I assume that means that the demand is there.
That’s awful. I wish valve would limit it to one per account and just be done with it.
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Anything to create scarcity in the market. If they can buy high and sell it to some idiot that pays higher, thats all they care about.
If you search the old ones on ebay, the scalpers all have photos with a room full of steamdeck boxes
I can’t imagine paying $1000 to play my backlog of under $5 games.
I mean…how big is that backlog and how much are you playing on the go? There’s been no better device for handheld gaming, IMO, though I can see why it isn’t tempting at that price.
While the steam deck is a good device, it and every other modern handheld is designed like the switch which is more of a couch gaming experience rather theb a true portable for playing on the go
Yup, I take the train and everyone who’s gaming is on their phone or a retro handheld. In the airport is a different story though.
Vita gang enters the room.
Playing on the go is all I do with mine. Beats the hell out of a laptop.
Ha, no.
I think the difference is that in 10 years when the steam deck is on its final legs, we can still play our games unlike most other consoles.
It might be a spare laptop, steam machine, or something else entirely. But we will presumibly be able to play.
I can still play games on my 13 year old PS4, 20 year old Xbox 360, 30 year old N64, etc. What are you talking about? The PS5 is already 6 years old and shows no signs of not being able to play games.
At least until Sony and Microsoft shutdown the servers for the consoles and they can’t validate themselves anymore.
If Valve ever stops supporting the SD and you still want to use it so some reason, then just install a new clean OS or just leave it in desktop mode and move on with life.
No NEW games coming out on those though
No it’s kinda great because there’s already a banging catalog of games and they’re dirt cheap!
True, but thats also true for every other modern gaming handheld other then the switch/switch 2 since they all run windows, linux or android
Either way doesn’t invalidate my point
3DS, please come back!! The AYN Thor is trying. It would be cool if valve built something like it. Preferably with the autostereoscopic display. I know it’s a gimic and nobody uses it much, but damn is it a cool gimic.
I love the 3DS 3D effect. I had that shit on 100% of the time, and have missed it dearly.
So much fun!
ROG Ally is measurably better in every category and cheaper
windows 11
Lmao
You can very easily downgrade to Win10 and there’s a sizable community on r/LinuxOnAlly but it’s also Microsoft/XBox so what else do you expect? Still beats giving Valve 45% more money so GabeN can buy another yacht company and sell kids gamble boxes.
Set your expectations accordingly. ROG Ally is only cheaper until they have to build more with today’s component prices (if they choose to). And it’s not like Microsoft executives don’t have yachts or sell kids gambling boxes.
That’s all fair but it just seems weird to me to say “company X jacked their prices up $300 and company Y might, therefore they’re both the same.” Wait until the Ally gets a price bump and reasses. As it stands today, the Deck is now a substantially worse value
They will jack up their prices if they sell through their stock and decide that that demand will stick around long enough to justify another batch of them at higher prices. As it stands today, it is doing your fellow Lemming a solid to point out the current price discrepancy in favor of the Ally. When both of those devices are priced for stable market conditions, my recommendation leans heavily toward Steam Deck, but we are not currently in stable market conditions.
I’ve never had a Rog Ally, but couldn’t you wipe the whole thing on day 1, and install bazzite?
Sounds neat; I just wish they made an SKU where you didn’t have to pay for Windows (before removing it)
If you’re playing basic-ass games, an ARM/Android handheld may be a better bet anyway.
Especially considering you could play something like 50k emulated games that span 4 gaming console generations on a handheld that cost $35.
The SteamDeck is now a luxury.
The steamdeck was always a luxery.
All video games are a luxery.
It’s just now it’s also expensive.
What’s the best $35 handheld to get?
at that price point, the R36S clones on Aliexpress, i got one on sale for ~€22. they play everything up to ps1/dreamcast, n64 not so much though. the romsets they come with and their metadata are really bad, and the sd card is prone to die spontaneously, so it requires some tinkering
they play everything up to ps1/dreamcast, n64 not so much though.
Wait, but Dreamcast is newer than N64. Did you mean Saturn or 32X, or is N64 weirdly hard to emulate for some reason?
the R36S clones on Aliexpress, i got one on sale for ~€22.
Is there anything to watch out for, other than price (and maybe avoiding paying extra for a bigger SD card, if they’re unreliable anyway)? Do ones from different sellers have different software? Should I worry about trying to avoid malware, or just assume I’m going to want to wipe the thing and re-flash as soon as I get it, or what?
what i did is going for the smallest sd card, and buy a proper bigger one, then clone the “stock” card, and copy over roms and metadata from my nicely curated Batocera drive.
it can be super tricky to get any OS that officially supports the R36S to run on the clones, so i run the OS it came with. the device isn’t connected to the Internet so i don’t worry too much about malware.
dreamcast is simpler to emulate, n64 notoriously isn’t, I’ve been struggling with this system during my Raspberry Pi 3 emulation era already. the “real” R36S apparently is a tad more powerful than the cheap knockoffs, but i can’t seem to find it anymore - the closest available official one would be the RG35XX for $55
For $35 I’m guessing whatever on FB marketplace.
Android phones tend to become pretty worthless after like 5 years, but are still perfectly good for emulation. Hell 10 years ago I was emulating the DS without any issues.
Just make sure you don’t store any personal data on those devices. They become useless because they slowly turn into a security nightmare
I want to get something with a physical D-pad and buttons off Aliexpress or whatever, but I have no idea how to sort through all the random no-name choices. The only other criteria I have is that I want it to be fully Free Software with no malware and the best value for money I can find.
Here’s a good place to start:
Wait what? What’s this?
Have prices stayed the same on those? Isn’t valve funding arm support since their headset uses it. Maybe prices will drop and steam deck 2 will be using similar architecture to those instead.
