Valve Raises Price of Steam Deck OLED by $300

[ssj4yamgeta]

The price of the Steam Deck OLED has just skyrocketed from $649 to $949 for the 1TB model. The 512GB model has gone from $549 to $789. Damn, I thought the recent Sony price hikes were bad. If this keeps up much longer, I'm strongly considering buying a powerful mini PC for gaming and emulation instead of waiting for the XBOX Helix. I was planning on earmarking $1,500 for the Helix next year, but if the aging Steam Deck costs nearly $1,000 now, I'm having a hard time imagining any next gen home console costing less than $2,000. And at that point there's no longer a value proposition for me, because there's almost no new games being announced that interest me.

https://www.gematsu.com/2026/05/steam-deck-oled-price-increase-announced

[kamikazekeeg]

It's just getting worse, all this AI garbage has just completely ruined everything with zero positives coming from it.  So frustrating that an entire industry is just getting annihilated.  I'm just hoping my PC doesn't have any more issues that require me replacing storage or RAM and I'm gonna try to get a Switch 2 before the price hike, but I can't imagine getting a new console in the future if it's going to end up at levels like this.

I know I was seeing that apparently the Chinese are looking to delve into the hardware market and pump out affordable GPU's and RAM, which could lower future costs, but that's only if it turns out to be viable hardware.