Steam Deck OLED is now $300 more expensive, but in stock again

Valve has announced in a blog post at that the Steam Deck OLED is now back in stock after the gaming handheld has been listed as "sold out" almost continuously over the past few months. The Steam Deck OLED can now be ordered again directly from Valve. However, Valve has increased the prices so that the two available variants are now offered at the following prices:

• Steam Deck OLED (512 GB): $789 (instead of $549, +44%)
• Steam Deck OLED (1 TB): $949 (instead of $649, +46%)

The Steam Deck LCD with 256 GB SSD, which was previously offered as an entry-level option, has been completely removed from the range by Valve. While the Steam Deck was launched in February 2022 at prices starting at $399, the cheapest version of Valve's gaming handheld costs $390 or 98 percent more over four years later - with unchanged performance that will no longer be able to handle nearly as many current games in 2026 as it did at launch.

The reason for the price increase is unsurprisingly the DRAM crisis – due to the high demand for RAM and SSDs from AI giants such as OpenAI, the production costs of the Steam Deck have risen, as Valve has to purchase the 16 GB RAM and the 512 GB to 1 TB SSD at much higher prices than before. This price increase makes the Steam Deck OLED considerably more expensive than some similarly powerful gaming handhelds, such as the Asus ROG Xbox Ally, which costs $598 on Amazon with Ryzen AI Z2 A, 16 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD.