Valve Jacked Up Steam Deck OLED Prices by Over $240, Blaming Chip Crisis
Just when handheld gaming felt affordable, the corporate reality check hit hard. Our favorite budget-friendly console is suddenly stepping into luxury territory, leaving gamers to wonder if they should just buy a whole laptop instead.
The price hike affects both brand-new and refurbished models of the portable machine. Buying the 512 GB OLED model now requires shelling out $789 instead of the original $549, while the top-tier 1 TB version has jumped to a staggering $949. Even the refurbished units, which used to be the ultimate budget hack, didn't escape the corporate scalping: the refurbished 512 GB now sits at $629, while the 1 TB refurbished model is priced at $759.
European gamers are feeling the burn just as badly, with the 512 GB and 1 TB models adjusted to €779 and €919 respectively. Valve blamed the sudden price explosion on the ongoing global memory crisis, pointing at severe shortages of LPDDR5 RAM and SSD components. It turns out that building a portable PC is incredibly hard when the silicon market behaves like a toilet paper aisle in 2020.
The company actually warned players back in February that supply chain hiccups might cause the device to occasionally go out of stock in several regions. Instead of just letting the digital shelves sit empty, they chose the classic corporate route of making the product so expensive that fewer people can afford to buy it anyway.
Handheld gaming was supposed to democratize PC gaming on the go, but this massive price hike turns the console into an elite toy. Now that a portable screen costs nearly as much as a fully loaded mid-range gaming laptop, the entire value proposition of handheld gaming is officially in shambles.
Source: Steam Store
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