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 representation spot shortages, caused by a proliferation of AI-huffing information centres, proceed to marque PC games hardware scarcer, little affordable, and mostly miserable. The latest unfortunate is the Steam Deck OLED, which returned to banal yesterday – and it’d beryllium precise bully to extremity the condemnation there, but alas – with immoderate hardly believable terms hikes.

The basal 512GB model, antecedently connected merchantability astatine £479 / $549, is present £649 / $789, making jumps of 35% and 44% respectively. The 1TB mentation manages to fare adjacent worse, rising from £569 / $649 to £779 / $949. That’s an ostentation complaint of 36% successful the UK, and 46% successful the US.

Valve, who’ve already delayed the caller Steam Machine and Steam Frame VR kit implicit constituent concerns, accidental that "these caller prices bespeak the existent authorities of constituent costs and different planetary logistical challenges crossed the manufacture arsenic a whole." There is, inarguably, immoderate information to this. Yet adjacent the lightest interrogation of these caller numbers reveals they’ve been gouged to an grade that adjacent different handheld PCs, truthful seldom sticklers for assertive worth propositions, mightiness find excessive.

The 1TB Deck OLED present comes wrong conscionable a fewer notes of the equivalent Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, an unthinkable result erstwhile the ROG's 1TB broke $1000 astatine motorboat past year. Mere months later, it’s a overmuch much almighty handheld than the Steam Deck OLED, for hardly immoderate other cash. The 512GB edition's fund credentials are beauteous overmuch shot, too, with the £549 Lenovo Legion Go S – successful the close SteamOS configuration – cleanly undercutting it.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

Readers, this fuckin’ sucks. Even earlier pursuit of talentless fake creation 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 manufacture had produced since… well, let’s beryllium honest, the archetypal Steam Deck. A gaming PC, an OLED monitor, and gamepad controls truthful bully they virtually made a gamepad retired of them, each for little than 500 quid? That wasn’t a just trade. It was the bargain of the century.

More recently, the radiance has faded slightly, arsenic newer rivals with beefier processors and faster refresh rates person exposed the Deck duo’s struggles with much GPU-bothering games. To this day, though, my Deck OLED is the lone handheld I play for fun, due to the fact that it's inactive the 1 that champion understands its ain usage cases. It feels lighter, much comfortable, and much smartly proportioned than its peers, and fixed the prime betwixt a dilatory instrumentality that tin past astir the magnitude of a six-hour formation (with lone the ghostliest susurration of instrumentality noise) versus a 120fps powerhouse that whirrs itself adust successful 90 minutes, I’m taking the weakling. A batch of handhelds look similar they’re built to people precocious benchmarks successful a lab; the Steam Deck OLED is built to beryllium held, successful your hands.

It’s a superb portion of gear, and I don’t cognize if I tin bring myself to halt recommending it. Sadly, the information is that with Valve’s changes, a batch much radical are going to beryllium priced retired of owning one. There’ll surely beryllium disquieted muttering of what these hikes mean for the Steam Frame and particularly the Steam Machine, but to me, that’s the biggest shame of all.