Summary
The RAM crisis intensifies; memory prices surged, forcing companies to change pricing or downgrade hardware.
Steam Deck stock is disappearing worldwide due to memory and storage shortages.
Valve may revise Steam Deck pricing or delay updates; availability timeline unknown.
As the RAM crisis begins to intensify around the world, we’re beginning to see the knock-on effects. It began with the PC builders who noticed that their sticks of RAM had quadrupled in price in the span of a few months. However, it didn’t take too long before the companies that build devices in batches began feeling the effects too.
Some companies responded to the shift by changing their pricing, while others downgraded the hardware. Despite having a commanding position in the PC market, Valve had to delay three of its upcoming hardware offerings to better work out the pricing. However, for a little while, it seemed that the Steam Deck had gone unscathed, without a price hike in sight.
However, the cracks soon began to appear. First, the Steam Deck began vanishing from shelves. Then Valve confirmed that the issue was to do with memory and storage pricing. And now, the Steam Deck is beginning to vanish around the world.
Related
Valve is scrapping the Steam Deck LCD, so now’s your last chance to buy one
Get ’em while they’re hot.
The Steam Deck begins drying up on a global scale
And we don’t know when it’s coming back
As spotted by Gaming On Linux, the Steam Deck is gradually vanishing from stores worldwide. Beforehand, both the US and Japan could no longer purchase a Steam Deck OLED from the Steam store, as all the options were sold out. Instead, potential shoppers were greeted with the following message:
Note: Steam Deck OLED may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages. Steam Deck LCD 256GB is no longer in production, and once sold out will no longer be available.
Now, it appears that the EU store has begun experiencing the same shortage issues, signalling that the worldwide stock is beginning to evaporate. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance that this shortage was due to the perfect storm, combining cheaper RAM and storage getting much harder to acquire, people flocking to the Steam Decks in place of building their own PCs due to price hikes, and people rushing to grab a model after seeing Valve confirm the issue.
The bad news is, we’re not sure how Valve is going to fix this problem. My best guess is that they’ve slated a Steam Deck price revision at the same time they reveal the pricing of its upcoming hardware, so it can give one unified update to avoid confusion. Until then, it seems portable gaming just got a lot trickier to get into.