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.
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.
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.
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.
I would be curious to know what are the manufacturing costs of the steam deck and how much profit is made. I’m guessing it’s a single digit percentage, but TBH I don’t know shit.
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.
It’s unfortunate for gamers, but they sold out. So from a corporate perspective it was a success.
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.