All Steam Deck models out of stock in U.S., with fears that memory shortage will prompt price increase
4 months ago by Katana314 to c/linux_gaming
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.
This kind of shit used to be illegal, you know, back when America was "great." Are we great again President Krasnov?
Remember when America was great and didn't need to be "great again"? Pepperidge farms remembers...
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.
The only good side is that devs will have to optimize and do more with less or focus less on graphics.
Some might, but others will probably make games with ridiculously high requirements so the only way most people can play them is via cloud-based subscription services.
Probably, but I guess we should boycott these and choose a model with our wallets.
Yeah I got a Series S Xbox for $250 about a year after release (literally only got it because of the price). They now go for $400.
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.
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.
Exactly my expectation, sadly. The crypto/NFT rush and then the AI rush has shown GPU manufactures, Nvidia especially, that people will still pay for GPUs, even at insane prices. So of course being a publicly held mega-Corp, they will keep the high prices and set it as the new baseline. Same to a lesser degree with AMD.
Ram will follow a similar pattern. Temporary extreme market conditions will create scarcity, prices spike to unheard of levels, desperate consoomers will still buy out what supply they can get, and signal to the companies selling it that the new high prices are actually totally fine.
The days of mid tier GPUs being $200-$350 are long gone. So are the days of 64Gb kits of mid-teir RAM for $200
And no, the market isn't going to adjust in a good way for gamers with devs and studios writing more efficient code that runs high quality graphics on lower end hardware. We will get the dystopia option, no more consumer PC parts, rent a pre-built to use at a huge markup, or you pay for an online subscription to a cloud gaming platform. Either way, it enshitifies.
I got 96gb of regular ddr4 and 12gb of GGDR6X video memory, willing to trade for a single family home.
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.
I've seen people mention headlines that memory producers are intentionally not increasing production in order to not have a post-bubble glut - but also found at least one headline suggesting that they were in fact planning new factories, so... Who knows.
I think with the lead time required for new factories that catching up may be super slow. I'm inclined to lead towards the former still even with new fabs coming.
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
Thanks for that! I thought they had gone out of business but ok.
I sell things on ebay, but I am always reluctant to sell electronics there. Seems like it could bite me in the ass and shipping would be pretty rough.
Please don't profiteer on the back of AI
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.
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!
That's not what profiteering means
"the practice of making or seeking to make an excessive or unfair profit,". ?
When do y'all figure manufacturers will realize we don't want to trade PC gaming for "AI" horseshit?
Fuck that. I'd rather go outside.
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
Yep. Exactly how I learned they were out of stock. :)
Scalpers gonna scalp.
I wish I never sold my deck.
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.
I went over to the Steam Deck website and all models are sold out.
They announced LCD going out of production and once run out, it would not be restocked. This was a few months back I think.
Hopefully they only increase prices in the US. I don't want customers from other countries like in the EU make up for Trumps stupid tariffs.
The AI-over-investment-sparked memory shortage is what's causing the problem, not Republican tariffs.
It's both, although the former more than the latter. Also, part of the hoarding is likely happening precisely because of the uncertainty of the tariff policies.
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@lemmy.world
Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
This page can be subscribed to via RSS.
Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
No memes/shitposts/low-effort posts, please.
Resources
Help:
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- Are We Anticheat Yet?
- r/linux_gaming FAQ
- Fork of an earlier version of the above
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This is a weird generation of consoles. If you're an early adopter, you probably saved money. That sorta thing never happens.
save