Yep. Exactly how I learned they were out of stock. :)
I had to replace my travel notebook recently and wanted a bit more horsepower, ended up getting a steamdeck OLED because it was half the price of an equivelent laptop.
This is a weird generation of consoles. If you’re an early adopter, you probably saved money. That sorta thing never happens.
Yeah I got a Series S Xbox for $250 about a year after release (literally only got it because of the price). They now go for $400.
The old ways are gone, possibly never to return in our lifetime. My PS5, Steam Deck, and mid-range 2021 PC will have to do for the foreseeable future.
All so Sam fucking Altman can cut off supply to his competition, just trying to get even more wealthy… Scumbag…
This kind of shit used to be illegal, you know, back when America was “great.” Are we great again President Krasnov?
Remember when America was great and didn’t need to be “great again”? Pepperidge farms remembers…
Ummm…no.
Better than this? Yeah!
But, fuck man, the term banana republic only exists because of us.
I dunno I remember a time when Japan decided to fuck with America’s boats and then they decided this whole World War 2 thing was getting pretty out of hand and decided to make it stop. They maybe went a little bit too far, but that was still generally pretty great of them.
Damn you must be old if you remember that.
Make America like it was when our great grandparents were young again! (Edit: Not the Jim Crow part)
Because that was the last time we had a social democratic government that stood up to fascists.
Oh, well, the fact that we saw it all as “not our problem” until then kinda makes us opportunistic assholes, though. Especially since we exploited the hell out of the post war circumstances. Shit, original concept for the UN gave us the only veto. But we had to bribe the reluctant countries with something.
Oh, don’t forget that the horrible evil enemy everyone was fighting took a LOT of inspiration in the mechanics of how to be so evil directly from American politics.
So, helping end the war? Yeah, that’s generally a pretty cool thing. Everything else? Ummm, yuck.
The myth we were all taught about the nobility of our country was never true. For fucks sake, the founding of our country was upon the genocide of the native population.
No, we’ve never been great. Sorry.
The only good side is that devs will have to optimize and do more with less or focus less on graphics.
Some might, but others will probably make games with ridiculously high requirements so the only way most people can play them is via cloud-based subscription services.
Probably, but I guess we should boycott these and choose a model with our wallets.
Sub-people will subscribe.
If we’d had boycott powers like that, we would already use it to prevent this bullshit in the first place. We weren’t able to prevent shit that nobody wants, imagine trying to boycott shit that some people actually want to have.
Yes but most of the Steam Deck owners are probably not into games with really high requirements.
And, for those who are, it’s great to be able to play demanding games with cheap (for now) hardware.
We absolutely should, but previous experience suggests that people will just pay for the subs.
Or just not bought it via Valve.
Me with the OLED and the original:
This is my situation too! I bought the original LCD one when they were on pre-order, then my right bumper button broke (a common issue with the first models) and I took too long to request the free fix/replacement from Valve.
So my wife encouraged me to just buy one of the new OLED ones that had just released and she’d take my old one.
She hardly games on it anyway, and when she does, I showed her how to remap that bumper button to a different button. Almost no games use the trigger buttons on the underside of the Steam Deck, so those are always available.
I have an original model with a bad right bumper as well. I’m too cheap to buy a new one (or fix it) so I just remap that button. Honestly it’s more comfortable to play using the back buttons.
Right? The way I hold controllers, I can barely reach the bumper buttons without shifting my whole hand, so it’s much easier to just use those underside buttons.
Dystopian fucking timeline to be alive, gamer or not
The RAM shortage is only temporary, it will pass. But the popularity of the Steam Deck is opening the floodgates for more mainstream Linux devices.
The RAM shortage is only temporary, it will pass
Just like GPU shortage was temporary… Oh wait.
The shortage was temporary, the price increase was not.
Exactly my expectation, sadly. The crypto/NFT rush and then the AI rush has shown GPU manufactures, Nvidia especially, that people will still pay for GPUs, even at insane prices. So of course being a publicly held mega-Corp, they will keep the high prices and set it as the new baseline. Same to a lesser degree with AMD.
Ram will follow a similar pattern. Temporary extreme market conditions will create scarcity, prices spike to unheard of levels, desperate consoomers will still buy out what supply they can get, and signal to the companies selling it that the new high prices are actually totally fine.
The days of mid tier GPUs being $200-$350 are long gone. So are the days of 64Gb kits of mid-teir RAM for $200
And no, the market isn’t going to adjust in a good way for gamers with devs and studios writing more efficient code that runs high quality graphics on lower end hardware. We will get the dystopia option, no more consumer PC parts, rent a pre-built to use at a huge markup, or you pay for an online subscription to a cloud gaming platform. Either way, it enshitifies.
Any reason why it should be different with RAM?
Also the GPU shortage hasn’t gone anywhere as shown by the 50xx cards release and with Nvidia saying it will not even release new GPUs in 2026, it’s only getting worse.
RAM is easier to make and there are way more fabs. It should be better.
Who in their right mind will sell it cheaper than the competitors?
Time to sell mine! Where can I do that? And if you say Facebook marketplace, that is absolutely a no go.
Haven’t used this in a few years but https://swappa.com/listings/steam-deck
Thanks for that! I thought they had gone out of business but ok.
eBay, but there’s fees of course.
Or find a hardware swap thread
I sell things on ebay, but I am always reluctant to sell electronics there. Seems like it could bite me in the ass and shipping would be pretty rough.
Craigslist? Kijiji? Dunno where you’re based out of
Please don’t profiteer on the back of AI
Your comment kinda sounds like an accusation. If they don’t jack up the price, it’s not profiteering. Hell, even if they sell at the price they paid, it still doesn’t meet the definition.
But, I agree with the sentiment. Scalpers should be drawn and quartered, at minimum!
I have two. I am reluctant to sell the one I never use because selling things is barely worth the hassle. If I made back what I paid I would be happy. If the market is worth it now, I really can’t control or be held responsible for what caused it.
That’s not what profiteering means
“the practice of making or seeking to make an excessive or unfair profit,”. ?
I have 128GB of DDR4 RAM that I’ll sell for $20k
I got 96gb of regular ddr4 and 12gb of GGDR6X video memory, willing to trade for a single family home.
I’ve never seen a shortage not followed by a glut.
I’ve seen people mention headlines that memory producers are intentionally not increasing production in order to not have a post-bubble glut - but also found at least one headline suggesting that they were in fact planning new factories, so… Who knows.
I think with the lead time required for new factories that catching up may be super slow. I’m inclined to lead towards the former still even with new fabs coming.
I mean, true, but I don’t think the Machine and VR headset are competing with the Deck.
Oof.
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Scalpers gonna scalp.
Hopefully they only increase prices in the US. I don’t want customers from other countries like in the EU make up for Trumps stupid tariffs.
The AI-over-investment-sparked memory shortage is what’s causing the problem, not Republican tariffs.
It’s both, although the former more than the latter. Also, part of the hoarding is likely happening precisely because of the uncertainty of the tariff policies.
New hardware is coming out soon. This is not unusual before a big product launch.
The GabeCube/Frame/Controller 2 shouldn’t have anything to do with the Deck, though. They’re entirely different products, so they shouldn’t impact availability of the Deck.
And that wasn’t true with the past update to the Deck, either; the 64GB and 512GB LCD models were available for so long that they went on clearance pricing multiple times before they sold out.
Deck is 4 years old at this point. They shouldn’t honestly be making anymore, and I don’t think AMD would even be doing production runs of that SoC a ymore anyway. These devices aren’t meant to be produced into perpetuity, and especially not when the same company paying to produce them has THREE new hardware devices coming out any day. It’s the last thing they’d care about.
So if course they’re going out of stock. The Deck was never meant to be a generational console like a Switch. It’s simple PC hardware meant to span the 3-5 year gap, same as a laptop. Again, this is year 4, and they have OTHER new hardware coming out.
This tells you a few things:
- They don’t want Deck in stock for price comparison to new hardware if it’s going to be more expensive
- They really want to motivate sales of Frame as a Deck alternative
- They want another product pivot to follow up later, which will probably be Deck 2 or whatever
Author of this article is just in the wrong neighborhood.
I mean, I don’t have any direct sources on hand to refute that, but that logic doesn’t pass the sniff test, at least to me.
The Deck is an incredibly successful product that constantly sits near the top of the “all sales” chart, is incredibly important for Valve to keep computing open (and not lose their entire business model to Windows’ enshittification), and has virtually 0 overlap with any of the products coming out.
If anything, I’d expect them to cancel the GabeCube before the Deck, at least until the Deck has a successor.
If you’re familiar with the logistics of the components industry, you might understand.
You’re completely glossing over the connection between these things. New hardware line coming out this month-ish(?). They also want it to be successful. The product overlap is with the Frame, Switch 2, Arm devices at large, and the myriad other handhelds trying to copy the success of Deck.
Now, if you’re Valve, your bread and butter isn’t the devices, it’s platform lock-in. More devices running Steam means more money, regardless of the device itself. This is why they’ve taken the time to make sure SteamOS was portable enough to run on a bunch of other devices, which is the big note here.
They’re thinking platform, you’re only concerned with a single piece of hardware that had a miniscule impact on their bottom line. They make BILLIONS in pure profit every year ust from platform engagement. Deck made them millions over four years. That’s the difference.
So what makes more sense? More Deck models, or more devices spreading into a larger ecosystem to gain further footholds into platform engagement?
Deck honestly doesn’t factor much into that. Frame and FEX however is going to be monumental shift into a massive expansion of Steam on ARM, and will probably ultimately mean if there is another Deck, it’s also going to be ARM. It’s a much bigger picture than all the comments in here are putting together.
Sorry dude, you’re just incredibly wrong.
I work for a HW OEM and while SoC availability certainly dictates the availability of a product line, there’s usually an opportunity for “last time buys” with plenty of notice in an instance where that part was going EOL. It’s unlikely that valve was caught off guard by the planned discontinued parts.
It’s also unlikely that they would like to deliberately make a successful and popular product unavailable without officially discontinuing it to promote other, yet to be released, products that have little to no overlap in use case. That makes no sense.
If a Deck 2 were about to be released, this would make sense. But it’s not, and so this is probably unplanned parts shortage causing the deck to being of stock.
You’re not wrong on your initial points at all, and I said as much above, so we’re in agreement.
You seem to be thinking Valve is shutting down Deck as a product, and I never said that at all. They just have more important irons in the fire. There is also an obvious benefit in them pivoting Deck 2 to an ARM SoC in the next version, and they’ve literally said as much. AMD already quietly announced their ARM-based SoC (sort of by accident), so it’s not weird at all for a company like Valve to: 1) Focus on the pivot they are currently making and 2) Focus on the development of Deck 2.
On your other point: nobody, including Valve said they were discontinuing anything. People are freaking out because they’re out of stock. So what? They have bigger fish to fry. If they do another production run, they may do it after launch of the new hardware just to see where things lie, but who knows.
If you’re familiar with Valve’s history in hardware, you know they don’t officially discontinue anything, they just stop selling it in between hardware revision releases. There is absolutely nothing weird happening here that is inconsistent with their history of this.
My personal bet is they are guessing that Frame will be in direct competition with Deck, and they want people to buy that instead. Running out of stock of one during a product push for the other just seems like they care less about producing a dated product, but have the option to make another production run if they see things going that way.
We also don’t even have the insights into how well Deck is selling at this point. Maybe it just doesn’t make fiscal sense to make another production run right now. Who knows 🤷
