Steam Deck

[Dragon Lord]

I wouldn't be surprised if we see the Steam Machine launch at or slightly above $1,500 at this point.

Also I love that people are absolutely adamant on defending Valve for this, saying that it's not their fault and it's the economy/AI increasing cost of RAM so much.

Fair. Problem with that though? These are the same people who were trying to rip Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox apart for increasing their price of their consoles by $50-$150, endlessly talking about how greedy they were being and how they are anti-consumer. But the moment Valve does it, and by a whole hell of a lot more, they are calmly talking about how Valve had to do it because they were forced to by the market prices and how bad the economy is and yada yada.

It will never not amaze me how far people will go to defend Valve while tearing away at other companies for doing the same thing under the same circumstances. At this point Valve could release the Steam Machine at $5,000 and the fanboys would find a way to defend it and justify how you should be thankful and grateful to give so much of your money to such an amazing company.

Man, I was worried about paying the extra $50 if I didn't buy a PS Portal before the price increase. That seems like nothing now. Though it really is a shame because I did want to pick up a Steam Deck some day because it did seem kind of fun and I'd want it for the same reason I wanted a Portal -- just so I could play games while chilling some where else and not being tethered to my PC/TV. But it looks like that isn't going to be happening unless something happens to allow prices to go back down to their original points. I don't care how much I like using Steam, I am NEVER paying $1,000 for a Steam Deck.

[Moonface]

And it seems this price increase didn't deter folks from buying it anyway, because the Steam Deck is sold out again. Granted, as IGN themselves say, there's no data on how many units Valve had available in the first place so it could've been a lower number, but either way at the new price I really didn't think it was going to sell out again at all let alone so quickly.

[Dragon Lord]

Sadly I think a large majority of those sales, if not all of them, went to scalpers who are going to be looking to flip them for $1,200+ now. Looking at eBay right now, people are trying to sell pre-owned ones for $800-$1,000 now and listings for new, un-opened ones are any where from $1,200 to $1,500. Sadly one thing you can always count on in these times is for the scumbag scalpers to come crawling out of their caves to make things even worse for everyone else.

[Moonface]

It would be funny if what I saw one person speculating was true, in that scalpers just have bots set up ready to auto-buy stuff when it comes back in stock and that Valve announced the restock and price increase so quickly that bots auto-bought them before their owners could stop them if they didn't want to pay the higher price. Either way, there's other options on the market that are as good or better than Steam Deck and don't cost as much now, so I don't know why people wouldn't consider those over scalped Decks.

[Dragon Lord]

You know, that's a good point actually. That very likely could have been the case. We know that they can in fact set up bots to do that, and with how fast they sold out and no sane person being willing to spend $1,000 on a Steam Deck, it's very likely it could have been scalper bots set-up ahead of time to buy out any re-stocks that happened.

Hopefully they will be stuck with those $1,000 Decks now and won't get a penny back for them.