Buyers who were procrastinating about purchasing a Valve gaming handheld are feeling regretful. The Steam Deck OLED has disappeared from the U.S. storefront, with stock levels sporadic elsewhere. Facing component shortages, the manufacturer may be considering a price increase.
You’re not wrong on your initial points at all, and I said as much above, so we’re in agreement.
You seem to be thinking Valve is shutting down Deck as a product, and I never said that at all. They just have more important irons in the fire. There is also an obvious benefit in them pivoting Deck 2 to an ARM SoC in the next version, and they’ve literally said as much. AMD already quietly announced their ARM-based SoC (sort of by accident), so it’s not weird at all for a company like Valve to: 1) Focus on the pivot they are currently making and 2) Focus on the development of Deck 2.
On your other point: nobody, including Valve said they were discontinuing anything. People are freaking out because they’re out of stock. So what? They have bigger fish to fry. If they do another production run, they may do it after launch of the new hardware just to see where things lie, but who knows.
If you’re familiar with Valve’s history in hardware, you know they don’t officially discontinue anything, they just stop selling it in between hardware revision releases. There is absolutely nothing weird happening here that is inconsistent with their history of this.
My personal bet is they are guessing that Frame will be in direct competition with Deck, and they want people to buy that instead. Running out of stock of one during a product push for the other just seems like they care less about producing a dated product, but have the option to make another production run if they see things going that way.
We also don’t even have the insights into how well Deck is selling at this point. Maybe it just doesn’t make fiscal sense to make another production run right now. Who knows 🤷
You’re not wrong on your initial points at all, and I said as much above, so we’re in agreement.
You seem to be thinking Valve is shutting down Deck as a product, and I never said that at all. They just have more important irons in the fire. There is also an obvious benefit in them pivoting Deck 2 to an ARM SoC in the next version, and they’ve literally said as much. AMD already quietly announced their ARM-based SoC (sort of by accident), so it’s not weird at all for a company like Valve to: 1) Focus on the pivot they are currently making and 2) Focus on the development of Deck 2.
On your other point: nobody, including Valve said they were discontinuing anything. People are freaking out because they’re out of stock. So what? They have bigger fish to fry. If they do another production run, they may do it after launch of the new hardware just to see where things lie, but who knows.
If you’re familiar with Valve’s history in hardware, you know they don’t officially discontinue anything, they just stop selling it in between hardware revision releases. There is absolutely nothing weird happening here that is inconsistent with their history of this.
My personal bet is they are guessing that Frame will be in direct competition with Deck, and they want people to buy that instead. Running out of stock of one during a product push for the other just seems like they care less about producing a dated product, but have the option to make another production run if they see things going that way.
We also don’t even have the insights into how well Deck is selling at this point. Maybe it just doesn’t make fiscal sense to make another production run right now. Who knows 🤷