{"id":912288,"date":"2026-06-12T17:12:03","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T22:12:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/12\/the-ramageddon-hits-home-opinion\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T17:12:03","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T22:12:03","slug":"the-ramageddon-hits-home-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/12\/the-ramageddon-hits-home-opinion\/","title":{"rendered":"The RAMageddon hits home | Opinion"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Valve rips the band-aid off Steam Deck pricing \u2013 and the prospect of gaming hardware becoming a hyper-expensive niche interest feels more credible than ever<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\n Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun<\/cite><\/span>
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The extent to which the ongoing crisis in cost and supply of digital storage<\/a> \u2013 primarily meaning RAM and SSDs \u2013 is going to impact the games business can be hard to grasp. It’s been the subject of headlines for months, but it can feel quite abstract. It’s one thing to read about the entire world’s supply chain for memory chips being rerouted into gigantic data centre projects, leaving only the thinnest of trickles for consumer devices; it’s quite another thing to really internalise what that means at a consumer level.<\/p>\n

Valve’s eye-watering price hikes for its Steam Deck handhelds<\/a> this week appear to have been a moment where that formerly abstract idea became very tangible for quite a lot of people. The base Steam Deck with 512GB of storage jumped from $550 to $790, with the 1TB model going from $650 to $950 \u2013 rises of well over 40%.<\/p>\n

The Steam Deck is far from the first<\/a> gaming device to see its prices rise<\/a> as component costs begin to bite in earnest, but it feels like something of a watershed moment, nonetheless. Console price hikes have mostly been incremental \u2013 $50 here, $100 there \u2013 which doesn’t change how expensive these devices have become but still felt not too different from business as usual. If you squinted and turned your head to one side, those price hikes could look like a consequence of high inflation and\/or corporate greed, rather than the first tumbling rocks indicating the landslide barrelling down the hill towards us.<\/p>\n

Rather than prolonging the agony of watching its hardware gradually inch up the price scale, Valve has clearly made a conscious decision to tear the band-aid off in one go \u2013 and good god, it hurts<\/em>. It’s not just that 40%+ price rises are far beyond anything that could be explained by inflation. It’s also the matter of who’s doing it. Valve has spent decades building a relationship of truly remarkable trust with its consumers. It’s very telling that few of the reactions to the price hikes accuse Valve of price gouging \u2013 there are always a few, of course, but it’s nothing like the wave of cynicism that met earlier price hike announcements from Sony<\/a> and Microsoft<\/a>. When Valve says it’s forced to pass on component price rises, people believe them.<\/p>\n

“These price rises feel like a bucket of ice water thrown over a dream that Valve had kept alive for the PC gaming market”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Steam Deck price rises aren’t just forcing people to confront just how out of control pricing for consumer hardware is getting. They also feel like a bucket of ice water thrown over a dream that Valve had kept alive for the PC gaming market. Though it was never a best-selling device<\/a> \u2013 rough estimates put it in the mid-single-digit millions \u2013 for the past four years, the Steam Deck has been a beacon of affordability in a market that otherwise felt like it was backing itself into being an expensive niche hobby.<\/p>\n

The crisis in RAM and storage supply is a whole new level of unaffordability, but escalating hardware pricing isn’t a new issue in the PC market. GPU prices, in particular, have been on a steep upward trend for quite a few years, especially since gamers have found themselves competing first with crypto miners and now with AI datacentres; if not for the same chips, then at the very least for the same fabrication lines.<\/p>\n

The Steam Deck suggested that an alternative was possible. It was a relatively low-powered device \u2013 all the more so now, since its chipset hasn’t been updated since launch \u2013 but Valve’s work alongside open source volunteers to turn Linux into a viable gaming platform helped to eke extraordinary performance out of the hardware. A handheld initially priced at a market-disrupting $399 \u2013 notably cheaper than any high-end graphics card \u2013 offered a genuinely solid PC gaming experience.<\/p>\n

“That disruptive $399 handheld now costs $790 \u2013 almost exactly twice as much for a system that’s four years older”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That disruptive $399 handheld now costs $790 \u2013 almost exactly twice as much for a system that’s four years longer in the tooth. The dream of a high\u2013quality yet affordable tier for PC gaming can’t be declared fully dead until Valve announces pricing for the Steam Machine, the device which was meant to bring the Steam Deck’s price\/performance prowess to the living room \u2013 but we can all see where the signs are pointing on that front<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The new Steam Deck pricing does make rival systems like Asus’ ROG Xbox Ally handhelds ($600 for the low-end version, $1000 for the high-end) look far better by comparison, given their higher specs. Presumably, though, it’s only a matter of time before Asus and other competitors are forced to tug a bit more on their own pricing band-aids.<\/p>\n

That’s the really important thing to recognise \u2013 for all that prices may have gone up in recent months, consumer hardware pricing has actually been somewhat insulated from the full impact of the storage crisis so far. Major manufacturers had supply contracts and inventory backlogs, giving them some breathing room in which they could adjust prices more gradually. Most of the price increases we’ve seen so far are the thin end of the wedge. The full impact on pricing is still coming down the pipe, not just for gaming systems but for smartphones, tablets, laptops, smart speakers, and just about any other digital device you care to name.<\/p>\n

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