I got three texts the same week in May. All from friends in their late 30s. All some version of “wait, the Steam Deck costs WHAT now?” Fair reaction. On May 27, Valve raised the Steam Deck OLED from $549 to $789 for the 512GB model and from $649 to $949 for the 1TB. That’s a 44% jump on the cheap one and nearly 50% on the big one. The 1TB Deck now costs more than most home consoles. Tom’s Guide called it one of the most expensive gaming machines on the market, and they weren’t being dramatic. So the question my group chat kept asking is the question this article answers: is a three-year-old handheld still worth buying at a brand-new-flagship price? Short answer: at $789, only for a specific kind of person. For everyone else, there are three cheaper doors, and I’ll walk you through all of them. What Actually Happened Valve’s announcement was two sentences of corporate shrug: the hardware hasn’t changed, the prices “reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges.” Translation: memory got expensive. Wildly expensive. AI data centers have been vacuuming up the world’s supply of RAM and storage chips, and NAND flash prices rose roughly 500% over the six months ending in March. The industry nicknamed it RAMageddon, which…
