Valve announced that Steam Deck is getting a sizable price hike, bringing an increase of $240 to $300 to its handheld gaming PC–not exactly a vote of confidence for those of us waiting for Steam Frame, its upcoming standalone VR headset.
The company revealed the 512 GB OLED Steam Deck has increased from $549 to $789, while the 1 TB variant is going from $649 to a whopping $949, making for a 44% and 46% price increase respectively.
What’s more, the cheaper 256 GB LCD Steam Deck is no longer listed on Steam, which suggests the company may have retired it after months of being out of stock.
In a Steam news post, Valve explains what’s become an all too obvious occurrence in consumer electronics by this point: component prices are out of control.
“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,” Valve says. “We’ll keep you updated if anything changes.”
Notably, Valve launched its Steam Controller gamepad earlier this month, primarily because it “doesn’t have RAM in it,” Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali told Polygon at the time.
As it is, both RAM and SSD storage have seen exponential price increases over the past year, something Valve confirmed in February was forcing the company to “revisit” the pricing and release dates of both Steam Frame and Steam Machine, its pint-sized gaming PC.
Although Valve told Road to VR late last year it expects the price of Steam Frame to be ‘cheaper than Index’, the company hasn’t qualified pricing beyond that, making the new Steam Deck price hike all the more worrying.
At its 2019 launch, a Valve Index ‘full kit’ was priced at $1,000 (headset, controllers, SteamVR trackers), while the headset alone was priced at $500. If we apply the same ~45% price increase logic to either figure, it would come out to $725 and $1,450.
That said, we still have no idea when Steam Frame will arrive. VR hardware analyst Brad Lynch revealed in late April that Valve had imported 50 tons of “Game Consoles” into the US, which is a broad enough product category to fit either Steam Machine or Steam Frame at this point.
Whatever the case, we’ll have our eyes peeled for breaking news, leaks and more in the coming weeks, because as it is, we’ve already handily blown past the original “early 2026” launch window, possibly entering the dreaded Valve time… frame.
