Valve’s Steam Deck handheld has been largely unavailable to buy since mid-February, a victim of the RAM and storage shortages that have been driving up prices for most consumer tech since the fall of 2025. The good news is that the Deck is back in stock on Valve’s site and ready to ship in three to five days; the bad news is that it appears to have returned because somebody wished for it on a monkey’s paw.
The 512GB version of the OLED Steam Deck now sells for a whopping $789, $240 more than its previous $549 price. The 1TB version (which also includes an anti-glare screen coating, a slightly nicer case, and an “exclusive startup movie and keyboard theme”) will now run you $949, a $300 increase from its old $649 price. The old $399 base model with 256GB of storage and the older LCD screen has been discontinued, though this had been announced well before these price increases took effect.
These prices are particularly hard to swallow for a nearly 3-year-old revision of an over-4-year-old handheld PC. If there’s a saving grace for Valve, it’s that most competing handhelds from the likes of Asus and Lenovo are also pushing or exceeding that $1,000 mark. Of the Deck’s major competitors, only the $600 Asus ROG Xbox Ally (and its AMD Ryzen Z2 A processor, which is very similar to the Deck’s semi-custom AMD chip) is significantly cheaper than the Steam Deck.
“Steam Deck itself hasn’t changed; these new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole,” reads Valve’s brief announcement about the price hikes. “We’ll keep you updated if anything changes.”
The new Deck pricing bodes poorly for the potential pricing of the Steam Machine desktop, which was announced late last year at what ended up being a spectacularly awful time to build and ship a new gaming PC. The Steam Machine was always going to have problems competing with dedicated game consoles on price, but at this point, it would be a pleasant surprise if the box launched for under $1,000. Valve plans to launch the box sometime “this year,” and it recently appeared in the database of devices conforming to the Vulkan graphics API.
The only one of Valve’s new hardware announcements from late last year to have actually shipped is the $99 Steam Controller, because “it doesn’t have RAM in it.”
