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
Many of you are lying about being unemployed our there.
Same reason scalpers struggled to keep stock of cards being sold at 4x the price during covid, which directly lead to nvidia and AMD skyrocketing prices the second stock stabilized.
The world is full of idiots who have more money than sense, who make terrible decisions with no thought of the consequences or ramifications.
You can afford to pay more for this like this when you live with your parents and have no plans on moving out
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.
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.
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?
How tf are there so many people who have this much money just lying around? We are in a freakin recession (or damn near close to one), the most sensible thing to do currently is to NOT spend large amounts of money.
My best friend does landscape design and her clients are in the rich neighborhoods. The rich have plenty of money and in return makes her plenty of money.
The people with money still have plenty of disposable income.
Then there are plenty of people without that financial security that make poor decisions. The people that are actually struggling like myself aren’t the ones purchasing this.
It’s the furrys
Can’t be, all Furries work in IT, and everyone in IT is being replaced by AI, hence they don’t have any money any more /s
PC and steam boys are pathetic. They all think Steam is THEIR corporation and Gabe is THEIR billionaire. Bunch of cultists
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
Yep, you can’t fix stupid.
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.
We don’t live in a progressive society that almost universally pans impulse buys, unfortunately.
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 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.
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.
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.
The broader a customer base, the less solidarity there is.
Nvidia has shit on consumer goodwill in the past, they never get punished for it.
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…
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.
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.
So glad I bought one in January
