The $950 Steam Deck Apparently Isn't Too Expensive, As it Sold Out in Under 24 Hours
20d 1h ago by piefed.social/u/simple in games from www.ign.com
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.
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.
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.
only if they publicly fire and black ball huang
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.
If the other manufacturers had any sense whatsoever, they'd be using this opportunity to take over Nvidia's market share. Leave them no space to come back to once the bottom falls out on AI datacenters.
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.
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..
Or maybe save some money because everything is going to get worse.
Sure. I guess it depends on your anticipated financial situation and your priorities.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
No NEW games coming out on those though
No it's kinda great because there's already a banging catalog of games and they're dirt cheap!
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!
Vita gang enters the room.
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.
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.
Tbh I can't be bothered to confirm who exactly is managing the Ally but XBox's new CEO is on a goodwill-gathering streak right now. Brought down the price of game pass and seems to want to bring people back to the brand proper. MS certainly has the capital to subsidize console costs to gain market.
Again, all this is conjecture and came from me saying that right now, because Valve raised the price of the Steam Deck and MS hasn't done so for the Ally, the Ally is a better value. Today.
XBox’s new CEO is on a goodwill-gathering streak right now. Brought down the price of game pass and seems to want to bring people back to the brand proper
Oh, you sweet summer child.
You do you. The Ally is a better value today. Good spot; pass it on until they sell out, because it currently looks like Best Buy is pricing it as a thing that's in their inventory and not selling. I would recommend that you don't trust that Xbox is going to right the wrongs of Game Pass price increases just because the removal of Call of Duty brought it down to still-higher-levels-than-it-was-in-the-very-recent-past. And definitely don't trust lip service to things the new boss is "thinking about" and "treating seriously". In a world where the next Xbox is definitely for sure just a PC that allows you to buy games from any store you like, and the Ally is that too, they're not subsidizing hardware. Neither is Valve, hence the price hike.
I've never had a Rog Ally, but couldn't you wipe the whole thing on day 1, and install bazzite?
Sounds neat; I just wish they made an SKU where you didn’t have to pay for Windows (before removing it)
If you're playing basic-ass games, an ARM/Android handheld may be a better bet anyway.
Especially considering you could play something like 50k emulated games that span 4 gaming console generations on a handheld that cost $35.
The SteamDeck is now a luxury.
The steamdeck was always a luxery.
All video games are a luxery.
It's just now it's also expensive.
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?
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.
Sold out to whom, though... customers or scalpers?
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.
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.
If you search the old ones on ebay, the scalpers all have photos with a room full of steamdeck boxes
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.
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.
I do believe social media may be the latest, most distilled form of industry directing culture, in this case, hollowing it out like you said.
As we as a species began to study and better understand human thought, weaknesses or "bugs in the software" were discovered. That knowledge was then weaponized to wage psychological warfare on society at large. They learned that if you can persuade someone to fear something, you can then leverage that fear to make people think with their amygdala instead of their prefrontal cortex, making us behave more like predictable animals that can be conditioned to do things that are not in our interest because we are afraid something bad will happen to us if we don't.
Logically, even a child could see the ploy, but they got us using an older, simpler part of our brains that does not enjoy the benefit of logical, critical thinking.
I think that marketing and advertising has leaned on this for generations, but the difference now is that they have teams of psychologists on staff to maximize the manipulation. They learned that it is more affective to "hack" minds so they feel they need a product or service, rather than trying to persuade them to want it. In that environment of fear, more advanced human pursuits like cultural and social interaction are diminished. I am less inclined to form a community with my neighbors and countrymen if I'm afraid or jealous of them.
I think that this is the primary mechanism that stunted American culture and continues at a rocket propelled pace today. As you aptly pointed out, what passes for culture here is a collective concern about how we're doing in life compared to everyone else, based on who's got the most best stuff or biggest army of followers or rarest collection of Funko Pops.
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.
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."
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.
We don't live in a progressive society that almost universally pans impulse buys, unfortunately.
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.
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 $30 subscription, which outpaces the cost of a console in 2 years and also robs you of the shred of autonomy you did have
Don't worry, for just 50 dollars a month you can subscribe to the basic peasant tier version of GeForce NOW that entitles you to a whopping 4 hours of game play per month, as long as its played between the hours of 3am and 4am local time.
(With ads)
Gaming in general has been going to the wayside. Time spent gaming nowadays is spent on social media and online forums like this one. I'm not saying gaming is dead or even that it's remotely near that point (it will be still be around and thriving when I, a 17 year old, die) but coupled with the obscene prices, Gaming is not what it USED to be and it will be that way til something revolutionary comes...
I wonder if this just means the supply was really low.
Considering the current ebay pricing, it doesn't really make sense for any scalper to buy it unless they think it will become some weird coveted collectors item.
Either way rip steam machine. I hope they continue to fund Proton and Lepton because it really made a massive impact for gaming on Linux.
There are millions of 'gamers' in the usa who are well off financially, it wouldn't surprise me at all if it was a normal size shipment and people genuinely just were fiening for it
Where are all these people getting their money from??? And time to play video games???
1000$ 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.
Steam Deck is already out of date in terms of capabilities, it's not lasting several years
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.
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.
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.
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
can one play all, or just the best ps1-2, nintendo, and pc games in a few years?
I guess it's my imagination all the games I've been playing. Too bad, I'll have to throw it away now.
“Its not that expensive if you’re rich”
Rich? Definitely not, more well off than the lower average, yes.
Where does steady work at a 9-5 make you rich.
Lol?
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.
The same group of people who have the money to buy an iphone 17 pro.
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.
Jensen Huang bought them all because fuck you.
This article is untrue. I can literally buy one right now in the US. This is just fake FOMO hyping.
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.
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.
Do one more arrow below those.
Not that surprising - somebody's always willing to spend money they don't have on stuff they don't need.
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.
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.
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.
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 of 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 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.
"Superyachts aren't expensive, Gaben owns several"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nintendo manufacturers way more than valve does. They were producing switch 2s for almost a year or more before releasing so the current product on the shelf was made with cheap RAM or with RAM that was purchased on contract. They might be able to ride their current stock level for some time and walking the price up slowly so it doesn't look as big when they actually have to pay the price of current memory cost.
It's unfortunate for gamers, but they sold out. So from a corporate perspective it was a success.
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.
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 $300. (Yes, I realize the components are probably cheaper for Valve. But it just puts the prices into perspective.)
1000$ 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.
$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.
Insert the “we aren’t going make it, humans I mean.” Meme.
Half these "sold out" stories don't tell you if it was 500 units or 50. Supply was already a mess before the price hike ... AI ate the RAM market and now everything downstream pays for it. The device is great, the timing is just bad.
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
If they have to sell it at this price I doubt they have many in stock to begin with.
It is too expensive for me.
It was too expensive for me before the price hike!
So glad I bought one in January
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.
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.
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
I see, thanks for sharing!
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?
Time to get comfy with a forever game that will run on a potato like Cogmind or something.
Or just wait until china crashes the ram market
Yeah, I've had my steam deck a couple of years now, crazy that it's now worth more than I paid for it. Don't know what I'd do if it dies.
haha I bought one for my wife that is mostly gathering dust and was about to turn it into a microserver. Not anymore I guess.
forever game
TeamFortress 2 lol
Cogmind is such an amazing game! Add Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress to the list as well!
Forever games indeed.
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.
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
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.
scalpers live on the 'theres a sucker born every minute' ethos. theyve been proven right a lot
But we don't know how many were in stock? Could've been 2 units for all we know
It IS too expensive. Having no stock for months would make the same for almost every electronic device.
At this point of history I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia, Nintendo, Meta, Google or OpenAI buy it just to shred it.
Anbernic it is then
I bought the 1TB Deck Oled about 6 months ago for £660 but returned it and bought a £300 ROG Ally instead. Personally I think it's time the Deck was updated a little bit. It's too big and bulky for my liking.
So ign is trying to makes us buy the expensive Steam desk, thanks no bro.
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.
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
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.
PC and steam boys are pathetic. They all think Steam is THEIR corporation and Gabe is THEIR billionaire. Bunch of cultists
Well yeah.
It's got the Steam logo on it.
G*mers have been brainwashed to accept anything with that on it.
The Steam Deck is objectively excellent, what the hell are you talking about? Yea, that’s way more expensive that it was only a few years ago and people need to not accept the price, but still.
Thanks for confirming my point
They said that people shouldn't be accepting the price increase. What point were you making that was confirmed?
I am as disgusted with consumer marketing and advertising as anybody, but sometimes the logo or the brand on something CAN be a positive sign if it indicates the product comes from a company that has earned the trust they have.
I don't have a Steam Deck and probably never will. However, I am glad to see it being popular if for no other reason than what Valve and the Deck have contributed to gaming on Linux.
I will probably get their VR headset though, whenever that comes out.
That's a lot of words to confirm my point.
You don't like wordy confirmations?