This is a weird generation of consoles. If you’re an early adopter, you probably saved money. That sorta thing never happens.
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?
I mean it was like reagan they stopped enforcing anti-monopoly laws. That’s pretty much when the US gave up on being a real country and switched the trolley back to oligarchy.
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.
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.
When do y’all figure manufacturers will realize we don’t want to trade PC gaming for “AI” horseshit?
But your masters do, so you will live without gaming PC. Enjoy subscription streaming gaming from now on.
Fuck that. I’d rather go outside.
Laughs in TTRPG
Well my pc plays great a lot of older games up to 2020. My backlog is big and I bet there is a huge number of games which are unknown to me, that I will enjoy if I discover them. My rx6600 may struggle with 1440p sometimes, but I can always go back to 1080p. Almost all new games are trash anyway, so not a huge loss.
50% of the wealth in America is now owned by the top 1%, they can effectively ignore what we want and turn a more reliable profit, that is, of course, until the bubble pops.
Generally speaking, people aren’t spending right now. The surface tension on that bubble is almost maxed out. I doubt most of these data centers will be built before the paradigm is forced to shift back to a more decentralized model… I hope…
I also hope so
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
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.
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.
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?
Someone who’s not an asshole. Also, if you sold it for cheaper you’d make bank because everyone would buy from you instead of your asshole competitors.
That’s not how capitalism works. What will happen in this case, bigger players that don’t want to lower their prices will run you out of business using a bunch of dirty tactics, bankrupt you twice over, and continue selling shit for as much as they can get away with.
Capitalism might be a good idea on paper, but this naive shit never actually works on practice, every time they build it, instead of self-regulating free market working for people, it devolves into this hell where practically monopolies divide the market and squeese everyone dry
Anyone that wants to make sales? The entire concept of a market involves price competition.
Why would they try to play this game of pretending that a free market is a thing that can exist, when they can set whatever price they want. What are you gonna do, not buy shit?
Shortage yes, price no.
We still had craphole companies talking about Covid supply chain issues in 2025 despite obviously having surplus stock on their products.
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.
Yep. Exactly how I learned they were out of stock. :)
I got 256gb of ddr5 ram combined in the sticks I have laying around my house. I’ll start the bidding at $1M. No low balling, I know what I got.
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
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.
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.
why would there be a price increase after the release of the new one coming up? that makes no goddamn sense how about that for news reporting
the new one
The new one?
They cray. There is no new official steam deck yet. Valve would have made that announcement a while ago.
