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.
At this point of history I wouldn’t be surprised if Nvidia, Nintendo, Meta, Google or OpenAI buy it just to shred it.
So glad I bought one in January
Scalpers gotta scalp.
I saw another article that mentioned that eBay has them for cheaper than valve was selling them for. I checked and sure enough I can buy a 512gb version for 699 right now.
It is too expensive for me.
It was too expensive for me before the price hike!
Sold out to whom, though… customers or scalpers?
Right now, the only good PC handheld is the ROG ally & ROG ally X. Still available at launch price and has a better APU.
Can I put Linux on it? Otherwise I don’t care. Probably only Bazzite. Hate that. Nothing but trouble with all those shitty ass Fedora and Fedora based distros. I fucking hate Red Hat. They can’t do shit right and it’s pathetic.
Bazzite works beautifully on ROG no idea what the fuck you’re rambling on about.
And the xg mobile port now has an open source pcie dock for the xg mobile connector. You can upgrade the GPU and have 4.0x8 pcie lanes
I’ve been too spoiled by the steam decks inputs combined with Steam input. I don’t think I could tolerate another handheld unless it copied the input scheme of the steam deck.
If they have to sell it at this price I doubt they have many in stock to begin with.
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.
MSI Thin 15 B13VE is the model. The only place I see it for $800 is Amazon at the moment.
That’s probably old stock, everyplace here and where she lives has it at 30% more expensive than the Deck. Thanks for the info anyways.
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.
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.
Sounds neat; I just wish they made an SKU where you didn’t have to pay for Windows (before removing it)
I’ve never had a Rog Ally, but couldn’t you wipe the whole thing on day 1, and install bazzite?
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
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!
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.
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.
No NEW games coming out on those though
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.
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
Vita gang enters the room.
If you’re playing basic-ass games, an ARM/Android handheld may be a better bet anyway.
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.
Especially considering you could play something like 50k emulated games that span 4 gaming consoles on a handheld that cost $35.
The SteamDeck is now a luxury.
What’s the best $35 handheld to get?
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:
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
Wait what? What’s this?
The steamdeck was always a luxery.
All video games are a luxery.
It’s just now it’s also expensive.
$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.
Thats has hardware thats 4+ years out of date, and was already long since showing its age with running newer released stuff.
Its a neat device, but its… at this point… an old neat device.
Not that surprising - somebody’s always willing to spend money they don’t have on stuff they don’t need.
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.
So ign is trying to makes us buy the expensive Steam desk, thanks no bro.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 emotionally attached to.
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.
It got so shallow, though.
A long time ago, homesteading was the American dream. “Buy your own property, buy stuff for it, build your own life,” and that ethos extended to industrialization, post WWII (with the suburban boom), and even the 80s/90s.
I feel like that slowly broke with the rise of social media.
The “American urge” went from home/lifebuilding to encouraging short term, FOMO thinking. “Who cares about the future, look at this beatuful person, they’re using this thing and you need it NOW!” is what basically all modern ads say. Though there are some oldschool holdouts like Berkshire Hathaway, most big buisnesses seem to have adopted that mindset for their own decisions, too.
Yep, you can’t fix stupid.
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.”
People really underestimate how much money other people have. $950 is expensive, but there are so many people out there who can afford that.
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.
We don’t live in a progressive society that almost universally pans impulse buys, unfortunately.
There are plenty of people in the world who can buy these things without it affecting their financial stability. The US has 20+ million millionaires. Around half if you remove their primary residence. These people won’t blink an eye by this price increase.
Where are all these people getting their money from??? And time to play video games???
The same group of people who have the money to buy an iphone 17 pro.
1000$ isn’t all that much for a purchase that should last for several years if you’re an adult with a steady job and your primary hobby is gaming.
“Its not that expensive if you’re rich”
Rich? Definitely not, more well off than the lower average, yes.
Steam Deck is already out of date in terms of capabilities, it’s not lasting several years
There is now a selection of handhelds out there that are newer and arguably better, but they’re also expensive. I kinda think the Lenovo legion go gen 2 might be cool with steam OS installed - but it costs like 2k
I guess it’s my imagination all the games I’ve been playing. Too bad, I’ll have to throw it away now.
I’d need another lifetime or three to go through the catalog of classic games it can run. Not everyone is chasing the dragon. If you’re not pixel peeping or prone to crashing out every time the FPS dips below 60, you’ll survive just fine. Turn the graphics slider down a notch and just enjoy the game. And as a portable PC I could probably get another decade out of the thing so long as the battery holds up or replacements remain available. It’s not like anything revolutionary is coming that’s gonna require me to have a better GPU just to fire off some SQL queries, fuss around in office software, compile some TeX, or whatever else.
Depends entirely on what games you play. Older audience are probably more likely to be into older less demanding games too. Personally the most recent game I’ve touched are from 2020 and 2023, and those are two big exceptions.
That doesn’t make sense. I have a PC older than my kids that I still game on. I think your statement needs more qualifiers.
can one play all, or just the best ps1-2, nintendo, and pc games in a few years?
I work full time so my screen time is limited, but the steam deck is my only gaming device, and in terms of enjoyment per ££ spent, it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever bought.
Maybe an unusual take, but I use the SD in desktop mode for working.
The USB-C supports Display Port, so I have 2 external monitors connected and keyboard as well as mouse obviously.
With another USB-C powered portable monitor as alternative it’s an even kinda portable setup.
