The Steam Deck OLED's price hikes have killed its status as the best deal in PC games hardware

RAMnarök claims a handheld all-timer with prices hitting £779 / $949

Ongoing memory chip shortages, caused by a proliferation of AI-huffing data centres, continue to make PC games hardware scarcer, less affordable, and generally miserable. The latest victim is the Steam Deck OLED, which returned to stock yesterday – and it’d be very nice to end the sentence there, but alas – with some barely believable price hikes.

The base 512GB model, previously on sale at £479 / $549, is now £649 / $789, making jumps of 35% and 44% respectively. The 1TB version manages to fare even worse, rising from £569 / $649 to £779 / $949. That’s an inflation rate of 36% in the UK, and 46% in the US.

Valve, who’ve already delayed the new Steam Machine and Steam Frame VR kit over component concerns, say that "these new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole." There is, inarguably, some truth to this. Yet even the lightest interrogation of these new numbers reveals they’ve been gouged to an extent that even other handheld PCs, so rarely sticklers for aggressive value propositions, might find excessive.

The 1TB Deck OLED now comes within just a few notes of the equivalent Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, an unthinkable outcome when the ROG's 1TB broke $1000 at launch last year. Mere months later, it’s a much more powerful handheld than the Steam Deck OLED, for barely any extra cash. The 512GB edition's budget credentials are pretty much shot, too, with the £549 Lenovo Legion Go S – in the correct SteamOS configuration – cleanly undercutting it.

Readers, this fuckin’ sucks. Even before pursuit of talentless fake art and error-strewn Google vandalism shoved PC kit into the doldrums, the Steam Deck OLED was arguably the best-value lump of cables and Torx screws that the hardware industry had produced since… well, let’s be honest, the original Steam Deck. A gaming PC, an OLED monitor, and gamepad controls so good they literally made a gamepad out of them, all for less than 500 quid? That wasn’t a fair trade. It was the bargain of the century.

More recently, the shine has faded slightly, as newer rivals with beefier processors and faster refresh rates have exposed the Deck duo’s struggles with more GPU-bothering games. To this day, though, my Deck OLED is the only handheld I play for fun, because it's still the one that best understands its own use cases. It feels lighter, more comfortable, and more smartly proportioned than its peers, and given the choice between a slow machine that can last nearly the length of a six-hour flight (with only the ghostliest whisper of fan noise) versus a 120fps powerhouse that whirrs itself dry in 90 minutes, I’m taking the weakling. A lot of handhelds seem like they’re built to score high benchmarks in a lab; the Steam Deck OLED is built to be held, in your hands.

It’s a brilliant piece of gear, and I don’t know if I can bring myself to stop recommending it. Sadly, the fact is that with Valve’s changes, a lot more people are going to be priced out of owning one. There’ll surely be worried muttering of what these hikes mean for the Steam Frame and especially the Steam Machine, but to me, that’s the biggest shame of all.