I got my Steam Deck on deep sale for ~$375. I would have NEVER EVER EVER paid the price they are now charging for their system.
It’s a shame. The hardware world is being absolutely gutted.
Any chance this goes away and we get normal prices again?
How long do we have to wait for a $5 weekend sale?
I had almost bought one but got a high end tablet instead. Now I’ll probably never get one.
Yeah, I bought the top end OLED one when it launched but that was a couple of years ago. Paying significantly more for that level of hardware these days feels insane. Obviously there’s a bajillion games playable on it but it’s fairly old tech (in tech lifetime terms) at this point.
I don’t think it surprises anyone that the costs for the RAM and the custom CPU/GPU combination have gone through the roof. Not to mention tariffs and restrictions on critical resources being withheld by China (see recent reporting on cutoffs of Tungsten).
I was talking to a friend recently, and commiserating. I bought a RAM kit right before things got terrible, a Crucial 32GB DDR5 5600 Mhz dual stick on sale for for $79.99 back in November 2024. That exact same kit today runs $376.72 (granted, not on sale) - so I think it should be no surprise that the Steam Deck and other such electronics have skyrocketed.
I’m just glad I bought that RAM, and my new Laptop right when things started to go bad - combining the issues I listed earlier as well as the endless chasing after the AI bubble, I agree that portable electronics are going to be unaffordable to ME at least for years to come.
And tungsten issue is going to make it much worse - my wife works for a domestic chip manufacturer, and much of the equipment she works with needs tungsten hexafluoride - which they were told today would not be available via any means for an indefinite basis. She mentioned that her facility may be looking at reducing production by a third if those machines go offline.
My guess is because the price of chips have skyrocketed because data centers are buying them up decreasing the supply. PC prices are also going up for the same reason. I bought my Steam deck back when they first came out and have found that I let it sit for months on end because I mostly play on my PC.
Prices on stuff has gone way up but Valve isn’t buying components on the consumer market. And it’s still balanced against the fact that the rest of the architecture is a low-mid range PC from 2021.
I’m not trying to imply that Valve is trying to rob anyone and maybe it’s 100% warranted against their costs. It’s still startlingly high for a price bump and, more to the point, I’d have a REAL hard time recommending a $1,000 gaming device from 2022 to anyone. Just because something is priced fairly for its materials, labor and reasonable profit doesn’t mean it’s actually a good purchase. $500 will buy you a Switch 2.
It’s just as bad for manufacturers that use these components. Many of the costs are based on the BOM/component costs: conversion, warranty, margins, etc. So while the manufacturer is not paying retail, their product is getting burdened with the same overhead.
Valve does not have huge volumes so they might also be getting squeezed by bigger manufacturers and thus paying a premium for the components that are remaining.
Sure but, regardless, a $300 increase on the consumer side for RAM should not directly translate into a $300 increase on devices using RAM.
In any event, the fact remains that this bump (regardless of quibbling over margins, etc) probably makes the Steam Deck a bad purchase for most people at its current pricing.
No, it should translate into a greater than $300 increase.
I’m saying that is should. The overhead is similar whether you are buying a standalone 512GB NVMe SSD or a Steam Deck with a 512GB NVMe SSD.
In this case, the Steam Deck has to pay more because they pay a faction of the cost to attach the drive to the main board, then they pay a fraction of that cost to underwrite a warranty for replacement.
Valve has an economy of scale that we as individuals do not, but at 1-2M units per year, it’s not a ton of leverage compared to ~300M SSDs, ~300M PCs, and ~1.3B smartphones per year. I think it is worse when supplies are this limited because the biggest players can afford to pay a premium to lock-in manufacturing capacity an entire year.
FWIW, I’m not trying to argue a point here. I am just trying to share some insight into how the costs stack up – mostly because I find it interesting.
There is a side-effect to the RAM crunch. Prices of other, unrelated components, are going up. If a supplier can produce RAM on their manufacturing lines, they are. Prices for ICs, sensors, and other components are going up because suppliers have tacked to RAM.
They were already paying the costs to attach the board, troubleshoot, etc when the materials cost what they did in 2024. It doesn’t cost more to plug in $300 RAM than it does to plug in identical $125 RAM
I work in estimating and, if I submit pricing on a project and there’s a jump in material costs, that affects the materials. We don’t increase labor costs as a result because labor wasn’t affected by the same materials now costing more.
I’m saying that it does though. The company that builds the boards charges a price that is a fraction of the cost of the build of material (BOM). The assembler does not look at the number/complexity of components to set their costs.
Then the company that underwrites the warranty does the same. And so on up the chain.