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The Great Steam Deck Crash of 2026: How the New Pricing Decreased Demand by 80%
- nashashmi 3mo agoRAMpocalypse are making computing pricey again. This is a complete rollback. Now I am going to stick with my 3 year old a little bit longer
- speedgoose 3mo agoKids grow up so fast. Enjoy the toddler phase.
- glenncal 3mo agoWell, it's quite old hardware now too, I'm sure that has a big effect.
- lenerdenator 3mo agoConsoles generally have older hardware. The attraction is convenience, not power.
- wasfgwp 3mo agoWell in relative terms that hardly matters for consoles due to obvious reasons. Developers of AAA games for PC can only (or are willing to) do so much to make it run acceptably on what’s a very underpowered PC compared to their target market.
- nottorp 3mo agoBut will Nintendo and the like be able to retain pricing for much longer? Of course they have better contracts but for how long?
- bryanlarsen 3mo agoNintendo Switch pricing increases $50 September 1. It only has 1/4 of the RAM of the Deck, so it's not hit as bad.
- gbear605 3mo agoNintendo is raising the price of the Switch 2 in September by $50. And that’s after the Switch 2 being priced $100 more than expectations on launch.
- Wowfunhappy 3mo agoNintendo has already raised the price of the Switch and has announced plans to raise it more, but it's still cheaper because the hardware is worse. I feel like Nintendo is actually really well positioned for these component price increases, because now they benefit from having the weakest hardware. There is only so much most consumers are willing to pay for a gaming console, and now the Switch may be the only one in that price range.
- gramie 3mo agoThat's kind of how Nintendo worked the Wii (with "worse" hardware) against the PlayStation and XBox.
- stonogo 3mo agoI wish I had a product whose 'near-total collapse' meant I was 'only' selling two thousand of them a week
- dumberquestions 3mo agoThings are relative.
- stonogo 3mo agoThanks for letting me know. Otherwise I would have assumed that 1.5 million of dollars of income per week was some kind of success!
- lenerdenator 3mo agoSomething desperately needs to pop the AI bubble. There's plenty of value to be generated with all of these other applications of computer hardware, value that could be generated much sooner than the horizon over which GenAI expects to see its first dollar of profit.
- dumberquestions 3mo agoI wonder if certain checks should be put in place to prevent a few companies from hoarding a valuable and limited resource many other industries rely on.
- datakan 3mo agoI've been curious to see what happens with all of this. I think a lot of people have been caught in a perpetual upgrade cycle they probably didn't need to be in but were out of decades old habits. The lack of hardware may start to change habits and behaviors to where the masses begin to ignore upgrade cycles. I'm already doing this myself.
- lenerdenator 3mo agoSame here. I've been playing Fallout: New Vegas on a Lenovo T570 running Bazzite Linux. It's playable. Framerates are good unless you dump a bunch of bullets at something while in VATS. No more buggy than it was on Windows when I was playing it back in university, which is saying something for a Bethesda engine game. I paid for the game and hardware years ago. It's not streamer slop or what all of the hip young people are into, but the story's good and I like unwinding with it. Honestly, it would have been one of the titles I would have played on a Steam Deck. Hopefully more people look into the classics. We've hit a point of diminishing returns with things like framerate and resolution at living room/computer desk distances. VR, while cool, is expensive and often requires a dedicated area.
- SleekoNiko 3mo agoThe monkey's paw curls...
- haburka 3mo agoI think people really underestimate the brand loyalty that valve has. They have consistently shown for 25+ years to strive for quality and I know I’m unlikely to get a headache if I purchase from them. Their hardware is really top notch, I have used a steam deck LCD for years and it was not until very recently that I had a single issue with a button that was easily fixable. Probably the purchases went down due to some people buying the steam machine. I’m surprised the article doesn’t mention that.
- datakan 3mo agoI generally find Valve's software quality subpar but their ethics to be vastly superior to anyone else's. For that reason they are the only place I'll even look for games anymore. They aren't perfect but they at least don't hate me like Epic does.
- movedx01 3mo agoWhat ethics do you see being superior in the company known for exposing underages to gambling? The anyone elses must be really bad guys. Yes I like my deck and I respect their contributions to gaming on linux, but Valve is no saint.
- VerifiedReports 3mo agoVirtue signal received.
- totetsu 3mo agoI always think now it’s funny that we Hated valve when steam was first introduced. Their pioneering of always online DRM and no physical media, soon to be followed by Bethesdas horse Armour micropayment dlc. The base line has shifted soo far from the days of freely auto p2p downloading of fan made skins on map load in q3arena.
- ChoGGi 3mo agoI was on steam beta, I thought it was great. No more having to dig around for patches, all my games in one place. It has its ups and downs, but I can't think of any other platform I'd rather use (though merit wise gog wins).
- JKCalhoun 3mo agoIf competitors are not raising prices dramatically, then they're eating that loss. Steam should follow suit—at least with something like a loss-leader model. When I rewrote/released an old shareware game to Steam some years ago I made just enough money to buy a Steam Deck. Since then OLED Decks came out and I'm jealous. (With the prices of the new Steam Decks, I'm wondering now if there is instead a way to retrofit my old Deck with an OLED…)
- rtkwe 3mo agoA lot of the competitors have had to raise prices too, Legion Go 2 is now nearly 2 grand for the Z2 Extreme version. It's hard to do a loss leader model in the PC space because they're not guaranteed money on the backend from game purchases. Even Steam can't really count on it because even though they're the main vendor people will use their existing Steam library in a lot of cases.
- ryukoposting 3mo agoPrices for other handhelds have gone through the roof, too. And no, there probably isn't a way to retrofit. Deck OLED's internals were overhauled, too. The entire board is different, up to and including a die shrink, and rotating the SOC. I wouldn't bet on any of the internal ZIF connectors being in the same place.
- JKCalhoun 3mo agoGuess I'll have to write another game… Bummer.
- Lord-Jobo 3mo agoYep. I love valve but let’s not forget that they are making 17+ BILLION dollars a year, 50+ million per employee. Gabe seems like a pretty good guy but he bought a $70m mansion and builds yachts as a side business… If they want to increase or keep market share they need to eat costs somewhere in this. Maybe they are positioned to do that soon if they anticipate another doubling of ram prices like Microsoft does, we can’t know their plans for future price increases. Reports I’ve seen suggest that they are making a roughly 10% profit per Gabe Cube right now, which is considerable. Valve will cite the idea that Sony/nintendo/xbox can sell at a loss because they are bundling in the profit from sold games on their digital stores, but there’s no guarantee Cubers will do the same. But that’s bullshit, we all know 99% of cube users will be buying shit through steam, it’s a weak defense.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Anoian 3mo agoBut they also introduced a new console and probably changed its advertising strategy on steam to promote it, probably taking away space that previously was used for the deck. Also, I think people are less likely to buy something that is perceived as old and because there is a new console, the thing they sold before now feels old. Additionally to all of this, they also introduced a new controller that seems to be doing pretty well, probably also taking advertising space away. No doubt the high price of the deck has an impact, but I would say that there are multiple reasons and not just one.
- ece 3mo ago72% revenue decline from a 54% price increase, but how did profitability change? Some of the features of the Deck are still differentiating like the OLED screen and touch pads, and maybe some of the price increase is meant to keep it profitable at a low volume. I personally think a controller and a VR headset that isn't standalone would be fine products for Valve to sell. Maybe they can't justify working on Steam OS without the Deck, Steam Machine or Frame. If they can still sell low volume differentiated products, good for them.
- k3liutZu 3mo agoAnyone remember when hardware prices used to go down?
- joezydeco 3mo agoYeah, we drove Moore's Law into a wall about a decade ago. Getting smaller and cheaper is now exponentially more expensive and slower to achieve. Call ASML and ask when you can get an EUV machine delivered.
- paxys 3mo agoValve just chose the worse time to make a big hardware push. Sad because the hardware is genuinely good, but there's no way any company new to the space is going to be able to compete in today's reality.
- joshstrange 3mo agoIt's a shame because the Steam Deck is the best gaming device I've used in many years. My Xbox One and Xbox Series X are both lackluster compared to my Deck IMHO. And that's without me ever "docking" it, just using it handheld. I won't buy another Xbox, the Series X was a massive disappointment and AAA games all suck. I found I was just playing decade+ old games on my Series X and while load times might have improved on the newer hardware, it wasn't enough to justify the upgrade. I regret my Series X purchase.
- glimshe 3mo agoI'm not a mobile gamer so I find the XBOX S pretty good for the indie game scenario. I own both the X and S in different rooms, and I realized there's hardly any game I play today that requires the X's extra horsepower.