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.
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.
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.
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 $300. (Yes, I realize the components are probably cheaper for Valve. But it just puts the prices into perspective.)
I mean it’s not hard to do the math.
Steam has 15 years of good will so they get the benefit of the doubt.
The others have more sordid history so people are less charitable.
No they don’t, this was a bad move, beaten in best practice by fucking Nintendo. Shameful. They should have handled this better. I expect better from them in the future.
This and the handling of the steam controller don’t look like good signs.
They handled the steam controller launch basically perfectly? To the point they actively screwed over any scalpers and made it essentially scalp-proof after the first drop got vacuumed up. No other product launch I’ve ever tried to buy has done as good a job as this.
I would be curious to know what are the manufacturing costs of the steam deck and how much profit is made. I’m guessing it’s a single digit percentage, but TBH I don’t know shit.
AND Nintendo told you the price was going to increase before they increased it, so you could buy it at the lower price if you knew you wanted one.
1000$ 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.