Valve’s handheld PC, the Steam Deck, is a genuinely brilliant piece of tech. Even four years on it’s still proving resilient to recent titles, and is often the ideal way to play so many controller-driven games. I treasure mine greatly, not least because to replace it right now would be far beyond my means. In May, in response to the multifactorial clusterfuck of component shortages and RAM prices, Valve significantly raised the price of the Deck between $240 and $300 depending on the model. Now, Boiling Steam is reporting (via WCCF Tech) that this has led to a colossal plunge in purchases, with the outlet claiming that since the hike, sales have dropped 82 percent.
The Steam Deck OLED 512GB went from a very approachable $550 to a hard-to-justify $790, while the 1TB version leapt from a still extremely reasonable $650 to $950. At the time Valve wrote, “Steam Deck itself hasn’t changed. These new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole.”
This wasn’t quite true, because something did change about the Steam Deck: When the device returned to the store in May after being absent due to production issues, Valve also removed the far cheaper LCD versions of the device entirely.
Hit the deck
It seems this has had a pretty brutal effect on sales, with the handheld dropping from 5th place to 14th on Steam at the time WCCF wrote its article. Looking at the current U.S. charts, it’s now slightly higher at 11th, but still significantly down. (It’s worth noting that in the UK, the chart has the Steam Machine in first place, and the Steam Deck in second.) Boiling Steam did some mathematical wizardry and concluded that this represented an “82 percent decline in weekly shipment volume.” The site estimates this is a drop from selling between 11,000 and 18,000 a week in 2025 to just 1,400 to 3,000 in July 2026.
Of course, there are lots of factors at play here. The loss of the LCD version will obviously have made a huge impact, given its significantly lower price, with the one version that Valve hadn’t already phased out being the 256GB that only cost $400. (Mine’s a since-phased-out 512GB LCD, and while I’d love to have a brighter OLED screen, it’s still plenty good.) Removing that lower entry point is clearly going to hack away at potential sales. And of course this all coincides with the launch of the Steam Machine, and while the two devices are clearly used for very different purposes, the Steam Machine is a far more recent piece of kit and a newer, flashier toy, itself at a hugely inflated price.
If the data is accurate, or even if it’s just accurately pointing toward a trend, this is another huge consequence of RAMageddon and the ever-growing crisis caused by the AI bubble. We’ve reached out to Valve to ask if it can confirm these figures, but didn’t hear back ahead of publication.
