Buyers who were procrastinating about purchasing a Valve gaming handheld are feeling regretful. The Steam Deck OLED has disappeared from the U.S. storefront, with stock levels sporadic elsewhere. Facing component shortages, the manufacturer may be considering a price increase.
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.
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.
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:
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.