The Steam Deck starting price is 2x what it was a year ago

The original Steam Deck launched four years ago to massive praise, and I was one of those people who absolutely loved it. It released with a very reasonable entry price of $399, making handheld PC gaming accessible to a massive audience. In 2023, Valve followed up on that success by putting out two new editions of the product featuring OLED screens and a couple of minor hardware tweaks to make the experience a bit nicer. Those models went for $549 and $649.

For a while, this lineup was in a really great place. For a modest amount of money, you could buy the entry-level model, which played games beautifully and just lacked the premium screen, and if you could put up a little extra cash, you could get a better screen and those extra little refinements. This balanced pricing structure held steady for a couple of years, but as we entered 2026, things started to get a bit…rough.

First, Valve announced that the $399 base Steam Deck was no longer being produced. Once the company sold out of its remaining inventory, that budget-friendly model was gone for good. That single move pushed the starting price of the Steam Deck lineup from $399 to $549, which is a pretty significant jump for anyone looking to get into the ecosystem.

Then came the challenges facing the current tech supply chain. A few months ago, both of the OLED Steam Decks went completely out of stock with no word on when they would be available again. Today, they finally came back in stock, but they arrived with a massive catch.

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. We’ll keep you updated if anything changes.

While the hardware is exactly the same as what Valve released in 2023, the pricing has been adjusted. By adjusted, of course, I do not mean the price went down, as console and PC prices historically have done over time. Instead, they were adjusted up by a pretty staggering amount. The two OLED Steam Decks received $240 and $300 price increases, bringing them up to $789 and an eye-watering $949. That's an increase of around 45% for each, which is blistering. And let's not even talk about how close we are to a $1,000 Steam Deck that's mostly full of 2022 tech.

As Valve mentioned in their post about the update, this isn't a case of them simply raising prices to screw over their customers. The reality is that their component costs to build these devices have gone up significantly. We are currently living through a perfect storm of AI companies gobbling up every hardware resource they can find, combined with heavy tariffs across a wide variety of computer hardware, and the result is that we are paying significantly more for tech than we did just a couple of years ago.

It is incredibly frustrating to look at the landscape today. A year ago, the entry price for a Steam Deck was $399. Today, the entry price is double that. That just means fewer people can even consider jumping in.

This looms large over Valve's upcoming hardware, specifically the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame, both of which were supposed to launch this spring, but they were delayed due to these same supply chain struggles. Given what we are seeing with the Steam Deck pricing, I can only suspect these new devices are going to be far more expensive than even our worst predictions. I genuinely worry that the manufacturing costs might be high enough that Valve potentially decides not to release them at all.

That would be a real shame, because the Steam Machine in particular looked like a product where Valve had totally nailed it. The hardware looked great, and SteamOS has evolved into a fantastic experience…it's a console-like ecosystem that I think could have won over a lot of console gamers who are curious about PC gaming. We will have to wait and see what happens next, but for now, this reality absolutely sucks.