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.
scalpers live on the ‘theres a sucker born every minute’ ethos. theyve been proven right a lot
After reading so much hate on Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft for years, especially over their pricing, its somewhat hilarious to see only one or two comments out of dozens here calling out the high price of this handheld console.
Like Nintendo raised the price of the Switch 2 by $50 to a whopping $499 and people will mock and berate you if you say you bought one.
AND Nintendo told you the price was going to increase before they increased it, so you could buy it at the lower price if you knew you wanted one.
1000$ may seem like a lot but its a small price to pay when you think of the new boat Gaben will be able to own soon.
Neither Gabe nor Valve will earn much from the higher price, because they have to pay a lot more for the Hardware that makes the Steamdeck. It is not that they raised the price out of smite but due to AI companies with their gigantic Hardware glutony.
I mean it’s not hard to do the math.
Steam has 15 years of good will so they get the benefit of the doubt.
The others have more sordid history so people are less charitable.
No they don’t, this was a bad move, beaten in best practice by fucking Nintendo. Shameful. They should have handled this better. I expect better from them in the future.
This and the handling of the steam controller don’t look like good signs.
They handled the steam controller launch basically perfectly? To the point they actively screwed over any scalpers and made it essentially scalp-proof after the first drop got vacuumed up. No other product launch I’ve ever tried to buy has done as good a job as this.
I would be curious to know what are the manufacturing costs of the steam deck and how much profit is made. I’m guessing it’s a single digit percentage, but TBH I don’t know shit.
Every Steam Deck has 16GB LPDDR5-6400. I’ll use regular DDR5-6400 as a stand-in. In 2 years, that’s gone from $100 to $300. So, +$200 in memory costs.
The cheapest 1TB M.2-2230 has gone from $70 to $170. So +$100 for the highest-tier OLED. (512GB M.2s are harder to find history on… but they also seem to have gone up about $100.)
So, the RAM & Storage in a Steam Deck now cost another $300. (Yes, I realize the components are probably cheaper for Valve. But it just puts the prices into perspective.)
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
Don’t worry, for just 50 dollars a month you can subscribe to the basic peasant tier version of GeForce NOW that entitles you to a whopping 4 hours of game play per month, as long as its played between the hours of 3am and 4am local time.
(With ads)
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…
Anbernic it is then
This article is untrue. I can literally buy one right now in the US. This is just fake FOMO hyping.
Valve randomly stocks tthe steam deck all the time. I swear they’ve got like one guy running the whole show, and he stocks things one unit at a time.
Looking at the bottom of your screenshot, I note the text:
“Note: Steam Deck OLED may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.”
They run Superman ragged with these orders. Poor Clark can’t catch a break flying shelf-to-shelf.
Do one more arrow below those.
So ign is trying to makes us buy the expensive Steam desk, thanks no bro.
PC and steam boys are pathetic. They all think Steam is THEIR corporation and Gabe is THEIR billionaire. Bunch of cultists
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.
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
Insert the “we aren’t going make it, humans I mean.” Meme.
I bought a steam deck when they came out (the cheapest one so I could upgrade the storage myself), and it’s a pretty nice device. But I honestly couldn’t come up with a use case for it. I think I just don’t like games as much as I used to.
Same here, I bought a play station 4, and it was collecting dust. I couldn’t find the energy to play, when I had time, I just opted to lie down and rest.
Is this old age?
I went with the Lenovo legion go for the switch-like removable controllers. It’s running CachyOS and I use it more as a mini computer than a gaming device. Same, gaming just doesn’t do as much for me as it used to
So, what do you do with it? Browse something? Play media? Or you connect external peripherals to it? I just can’t imagine much use case of gaming controls outside games, but I might be less creative.
Oh I just toss the controllers to the side and use a mini Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. One of the controllers has a mouse built into it too, kinda funky, I don’t use it often.
May use it as the brains and screen of a cyberdeck build eventually
But we don’t know how many were in stock? Could’ve been 2 units for all we know
“Superyachts aren’t expensive, Gaben owns several”
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 🤷♂️
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
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.
At this point of history I wouldn’t be surprised if Nvidia, Nintendo, Meta, Google or OpenAI buy it just to shred it.
