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The $950 Steam Deck Apparently Isn't Too Expensive, As it Sold Out in Under 24 Hours (www.ign.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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Valve recently raised the price on the Steam Deck, making the handheld gaming PC cost up to $949 for the 1TB OLED model. While that's a massive $300 increase over its original price, the Steam Deck is once again sold out.

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[–] 9 points 5 months ago (9 children)

After reading so much hate on Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft for years, especially over their pricing, its somewhat hilarious to see only one or two comments out of dozens here calling out the high price of this handheld console.

Like Nintendo raised the price of the Switch 2 by $50 to a whopping $499 and people will mock and berate you if you say you bought one.

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  • [–] 25 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    I mean it's not hard to do the math.

    Steam has 15 years of good will so they get the benefit of the doubt.

    The others have more sordid history so people are less charitable.

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  • [–] -4 points 5 months ago* (4 children)

    No they don’t, this was a bad move, beaten in best practice by fucking Nintendo. Shameful. They should have handled this better. I expect better from them in the future.

    This and the handling of the steam controller don’t look like good signs.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    They handled the steam controller launch basically perfectly? To the point they actively screwed over any scalpers and made it essentially scalp-proof after the first drop got vacuumed up. No other product launch I've ever tried to buy has done as good a job as this.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Nintendo manufacturers way more than valve does. They were producing switch 2s for almost a year or more before releasing so the current product on the shelf was made with cheap RAM or with RAM that was purchased on contract. They might be able to ride their current stock level for some time and walking the price up slowly so it doesn't look as big when they actually have to pay the price of current memory cost.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    Every Steam Deck has 16GB LPDDR5-6400. I'll use regular DDR5-6400 as a stand-in. In 2 years, that's gone from $100 to $300. So, +$200 in memory costs.

    The cheapest 1TB M.2-2230 has gone from $70 to $170. So +$100 for the highest-tier OLED. (512GB M.2s are harder to find history on.. but they also seem to have gone up about $100.)

    So, the RAM & Storage in a Steam Deck now cost another $300. (Yes, I realize the components are probably cheaper for Valve. But it just puts the prices into perspective.)

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