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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yep, you can’t fix stupid.
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.
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.
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 glad I bought one in January
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 🤷♂️
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
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.
So ign is trying to makes us buy the expensive Steam desk, thanks no bro.
“Superyachts aren’t expensive, Gaben owns several”
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.
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…
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.
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.
