Prices of everything’s going up and up… guess what’s staying exactly the damn same?
Wages. Nah, dawg. We ain’t buying your shit if you don’t spread the wealth.
Valve raises Steam Deck prices by more than $200
Submitted 2 days ago by commander@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://www.theverge.com/games/938340/valve-steam-deck-price-increase
Comments
Soulphite@reddthat.com 2 days ago
CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
NO WAGE ONLY CONSUME
athatet@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Time to consume the rich.
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
I’m sure the peeps at Valve are getting paid very well.
naeap@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
And somehow weed street prices
Agrivar@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Dealers know what’s up. Coke prices have also held steady for decades.
MoogleMaestro@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
You can thank legal weed for that. Oregon weed prices have stayed pretty cool and low for a long while now. Helps that this stuff is pretty easy to grow.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Don’t worry, trump controls the fed now. He’ll make sure the dollar becomes worthless, and everyone will be billionaires!
defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
The main reason the Steam Deck was popular to begin with was that it was a relatively affordable gaming PC in a handheld form factor. It has been getting less and less affordable as more time has gone on.
Going to be a very tough sell from now on.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Not if everyone else goes up too
4am@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
That doesn’t magically give me money to buy any alternatives with.
All this shit is Sam Altman’s fault, slimy fuck
Zorque@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I mean, it was also popular because it was relatively open in a field of closed handhelds. You could play, basically, whatever you wanted on it. Price was a factor as well… but it was never cheap. Just less expensive than other options.
IMALlama@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I bought an ally x about a year and a half ago. At the time it commanded a substantial premium over the OLED deck, but it had the specs to back it up. Since then the price gap has closed and Asus has released another version of the Ally. Asus isn’t the only other handheld maker in town and you can install Bazzite or Steam OS on most of the deck alternatives. Unless you want an out of the box experience that doesn’t involve windows, I am not sure the price point for four year old hardware makes any sense.
tacosanonymous@mander.xyz 1 day ago
For real. Doesn’t this just push people toward some of the cooler Lenovos, etc?
tal@lemmy.today 1 day ago
No.
pcworld.com/…/lenovo-legion-go-prices-have-jumped…
Lenovo Legion Go prices have jumped by up to $650 in six months
Every Legion Go S and Legion Go 2 device I could find was more expensive than it was last year. Thanks, AI-driven RAM crunch.
CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Depends how long they can keep their prices reasonable. I assume lenovo have some economy of scale in their favor, but I think they’ll eventually be priced up and out too.
mereo@piefed.ca 1 day ago
Nah. It’s all relative. If everything goes up accordingly, then steamdeck will remain a good buy.
defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Or nothing will be a good buy because people won’t be able to afford to get anything.
ripcord@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I definitely wouldn’t have gotten one if it was more than the $350 I paid. Although after I got one I would have considered paying more.
Noooo way would I pay $750+
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 1 day ago
There’s better handhelds out there now, but they’re more expensive. The Lenovo legion go 2 is supposed to be good if you install bazzite or steam os on it but the top end models are like £2000
defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
No other handhelds have the dual trackpads, symmetrical layout, and capacitive thumbsticks that the Steam Deck has, which are the selling points for me.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
At this stage, the price hike of the steam deck is probably more about making the price of the upcoming Steam Box and VR headset look like an easier pill to swallow, and not about actually needing to raise the price of the steam deck.
defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Could be both, but I think that both RAM and SSDs have gotten so expensive due to the AI bubble that even high volume manufacturers are having to raise prices by an unreasonable amount to stay profitable.
tanisnikana@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m tired, boss.
nuko147@lemmy.world 1 day ago
All things go up except salaries…
jaemo@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Don’t forget the body count!
fum@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Thanks “AI”
quips@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Thanks OpenAI*
asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 1 day ago
There are other AI companies as well.
Herr_S_aus_H@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Thanks Gabe.
Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
The only good side is that people are gonna replace their machines less often and that developpers might look at making games playable on less powerful hardware.
The gamers who are really in trouble are the ones without a PC, a console or whatever yet. Or the ones without something on the verge of failing…
I think it can have benefits for the gaming industry in a way.
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
developpers might look at making games playable on less powerful hardware
Yes, please let this lead to devs focusing on efficiency again. I don’t need real time physics simulations and “lifelike” facial animations that still haven’t found a way out of the uncanny valley after like two decades.
I want snappy load times, download and install sizes in the tens of gigabytes, not hundreds, consistent frame rates even when there’s a lot going on on the screen. I have more VRAM than God, yet I still get stuttering in some games on high graphics settings. It’s pathetic.
bingrazer@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
There were rumors that Larian was delaying their internal schedule for the next Divinity game because they decided to spend more time optimizing due to the RAM situation. If that is true then that is good.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
The main argument against the idea that the steep price increases in PC consumer hardware will lead to a Future of “everything runs in the cloud” is that the makers of software that can’t run on the cloud and remain decent (most notably game makers, as proven by the totally failure of things like Stadia) will just target their software the the hardware that’s expected that people will have in 2 - 5 times, which as far as we can tell is “the same hardware as people have now” because only a small fraction of gamers can afford to upgrade.
I would even say that the trend towards that predates this shit - in the last decade or so it’s pretty much only AAA games who have been pushing the envelope in terms of hardware whilst increasingly Indie games are targetting lower end hardware.
Iambus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That price increase for aging hardware is ludicrous.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, and they’re probably not making much profit on it. The cost of components is ludicrous.
They’re kind of fucked with the steam machine & frame. Unless they can source cheap components they’ll probably have to price the things so high it pretty much ensures these products are DOA. I dunno, maybe they’ll keep delaying release.
TotalCourage007@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah we live in a shitty dystopia thanks to Scam Fartman. Can’t wait to sell my soul for the next graphics card.
PaupersSerenade@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I was really hoping to get a steam deck when I got a job after a string of job losses. This sucks so fucking much. Can barely afford the bread, and can only wish to attend a circus.
lemmyng@lemmy.world 1 day ago
swappa.com/listings/steam-deck
Frankly, I’d recommend just buying a Mint condition Steam Deck from Swappa or eBay. And I’d recommend doing it soon BEFORE these sellers catch on to the price increase.
someguy3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Can’t imagine it’ll take more than a couple hours. Seeing as your comment is 3 hours old… it’s probably over.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Likewise, I’ve been unemployed for 18 months and have watched as several things I would really like to get have become too expensive anyway.
1984@lemmy.today 1 day ago
I think you shouldn’t buy a steam deck and instead save that money. It looks to me that there will be more and more inflation and food may start to become real expensive, specially if hormuz doesn’t open up and fertilizer can’t get through.
Tarambor@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Food is already going to go up in the future even if they opened the Straits today. Crops have sowing and harvesting seasons. Miss the sowing season because of a lack of fertiliser and you’ve no harvest. And those windows for sowing are fixed and known, you can’t just go “oh I’ve got fertiliser now so I can go plant my crops.” If you’re out of the sowing window you can plant the seed but it’s not going to germinate and grow. And for a lot of crops we’re in the middle of that season right now.
1984@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Almost as of this crisis is engineered, just like all the others.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 day ago
yup. you might just say fuck it, we’re not doing corn this year we’re doing cilantro just so you don’t let the field sit fallow an entire season.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Switch 2 is the “budget” handheld now at $500.
Rooster326@programming.dev 1 day ago
Except games are $80…
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Well, one game is. They haven’t dared price another base game at $80 sing Mario Kart World…yet.
oopsgodisdeadmybad@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
It’s been the budget option anyway in value, if not price.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It won’t be until it gets hacked. PC handhelds still have the benefit of being an open system, especially if you install Linux on them.
And Valve has significantly more consumer friendly support than Nintendo, to the point of being tinker support.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 day ago
If Nintendo didn’t have so many good exclusives, it doesn’t make that much sense to get ya.
Airfried@piefed.social 2 days ago
It has been out of stock since Christmas or something. At least here. I guess they just can’t produce any for a decent price anymore. Pretty sure that goes for most manufacturers. It’s the reality we live in now. Still a bonkers price for hardware that was considered somewhat outdated 5 years ago. The Steam Machine for under $1k feels like a pipe dream at this point.
Aielman15@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Europe: 512GB OLED went from €
569to €779 (+€210, +37%), and 1TB OLED from €679to €919 (+€240, +35%).I really like the Deck, but I wouldn’t recommend it at these prices, and the price increase is just bonkers even for the crazy times we live in.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 1 day ago
That is SO not worth it. Everything is completely fucked. Guillotining Sam Altman may not drop prices, but I still think it’s a terrific fucking idea.
some_designer_dude@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Of all the people to guillotine and for all the reasons… He is fairly far down the list. Still on the list, but not first…
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Wow, the 1TB OLED model costs 919,00€ in Germany. Man this is depressing times.
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 1 day ago
(the comma is a decimal point, right?)
oopsgodisdeadmybad@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I would love to see information about why don’t countries do that.
It’s called a point.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
A small, but important detail. :D I always try to use the correct decimal separator for the unit.
DupaCycki@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I love my original 512GB LCD Deck and I’ve been encouraging a lot of people to get one every since it came out.
However… at the current price point it just doesn’t make sense. Right now you can buy Snapdragon 8 Elite handhelds for less than half of a Steam Deck’s price. Or an Ayaneo Konkr Fit with much better specs and almost 2x larger battery for $999.
Everything is getting more expensive, but at this price I couldn’t recommend anyone a Steam Deck with a clear conscience.
HubertManne@piefed.social 1 day ago
yeah I don’t know about buying now but I sure am glad I got one after the first price drop.
58008@lemmy.world 1 day ago
c/NoStupidQuestions style question:
Why is making enough RAM to go around so hard now? I know the cause of it - AI cunts - but what is the actual bottleneck in the production of RAM that means it can’t be pumped out fast enough to meet demand?
IHeartBadCode@fedia.io 1 day ago
AI's demand for memory is pretty difficult to really get across because there's a lot of complex factors, but whatever you can imagine is the demand, it's higher than that.
You can look at pre and post AI to get a slightly better picture, but then the numbers don't look terrible and so the demand isn't as clear.
2020-2023 primary customers were smartphones, laptops, PC. Data centers were eating about 32% of the global market for RAM. Monolithic DDR4/DDR5 was the main product and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) was about 8%. Total memory set being sold was like 16GB kits to 64GB kits, obviously server kits were going out, just the majority was those mostly for PCs.
2025 hits and the primary customer is AI Data Centers. To put it at scale, you have literally everything that uses memory (and I mean literally every fucking thing on this planet) and AI Data Centers. And the break between those two bins are 30% and 70%. AI data centers are consuming more than twice the memory of literally everything combined that uses RAM that isn't an AI data center.
The primary RAM being made now is HBM, which is way more complex. 23% of all the wafers that will be used to make integrated circuits will be HBM RAM. And by wafers, I mean all the chips that will be made this year, lock, stock, and barrel. If you randomly picked up a wafer out of a fab you have a almost 1 in 4 chance to pick up RAM. And finally the average kit going out is 1TB to 2TB kits, which is a lot more than the old 16GB to 64GB kits.
Now I mention HBM because it eats more wafer, that's because unlike DDR4/5 RAM, HBM RAM is a three-dimensional circuit. 12 to 16 layers of silicon is stacked on top of each other. So HBM consumes about 300% more silicon than other memory (not every layer is one-to-one in size). So you don't just have one fab making chips, you have several fabs making the layers.
The next thing is that building fabs is complex. I hate trying to explain the complexity, but you can't do it overnight. Usually you have to build these things over the course of five years. Just to give you some idea of how technical the construction is. If you had a road within 500 feet of a chip fabricator sitting on a regular concrete floor, the car driving on the road would create enough shakiness in the Earth to cause the chip fabricator to bounce around too much. So when they build the place that have to literally isolate the small earth quakes humans walking around inside the place cause. This requires very complex floor building. And this is just the floor, not to mention how clean the place has to be kept, isolated as much as possible atmosphere, literally specific sections are under vacuum. It's massively complex to build ONE of these.
The complexity comes with a price tag. Average cost to build one memory making factory is around $15B to $20B. It's serious cash, but even if you have 5 years and $20B, there's a specific bottleneck. ASML. ASML is the only company on the entire face of the Earth that makes the chip making machines. They've indicated that if you ordered a machine today, you can expect it roughly 1½ to 2 years from now. That's how many people have put in an order for the machines to make memory.
So all that aside, there's one more bottleneck. HBM has to be stacked in layers, there are very few people on this planet that can do that, and they have years long backlog. And even then, most times the stacking fails. About 30% to 50% of all HBM is trashed because the layers fell apart. And the people who stack are entirely different people than the layer makers. But they're the same people that take that DDR4/5 wafer and cap it into that little black rectangle you see on your sticks of memory. So they have pretty much ~100% of their employees doing nothing but stacking layers of memory together.
Another thing is economic prioritization, HBM is about 500% more than DDR4/5's price tag per GB. A fab producing wafers of DDR4/5 is making about $x.xx. A fab producing a couple of the layers for HBM is making about 500% × $x.xx on average (it's complicated because of the layers), so if three fabs are pushing out the layers that's a total 1500% more than consumer RAM (which again is roughly speaking because of the whole layer thing), even with the stacking issues. And the profit margin on HBM is 70% versus DDR4/5 before AI which was fingernail thin. SK Hynix was actually taking a loss on production of DDR5 at about -1.6%. So going from -1.6% to 70% profit has created a crowding out effect. Not to mention that since there was a bit of a bleeding out period after COVID, some literally stopped making RAM. Which has made the issue even worse.
The last thing before I run out of characters is the AI growth. AI needs about 300% more memory every ten months. That's how fast these models are growing. If every chip maker was devoting 100% production to memory, they couldn't keep up.
Flipper@feddit.org 1 day ago
Its also not the first pig cycle in the memory industry. There used to be over 20 manufacturers producing ram. These three survived because they didn’t massively ramp up production when demand increased. So they’ve collectively said, we are not really investing into production.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 day ago
So when they build the place that have to literally isolate the small earth quakes humans walking around inside the place cause. This requires very complex floor building
first, thank you for your comment. i love learning stuff like this. you reminded me of an earthquake exhibit i saw at my favorite museum ages ago on how they put counterweights in roofs of towers to help protect against Untimely Shakey Falley Downey Syndrome, or earthquakes as scientoasts call them. i was really too young to understand all of it at 6 but the general mechanics were cool.
Tarambor@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The fact that it’s extremely specialised equipment that’s needed to make the chips of which there is a limited supply due to there being basically only one manufacturer of lithography capable of making chips at the nanometer level that is required, and the factories that produce chips are extremely complicated to make. And you can’t just make more machinery to make the chips because they require rare earth materials, China controls most of the global market for rare earth minerals and because of Trump they’re rationing them.
ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
ram is a volatile commodity that, while difficult to manufacture, is not as difficult as say a gpu or cpu. As a result in the past manufacturers have been pushed to sell supplies at or even below cost. It seems like a no brainer to start up a new fab right now but the reality is that would take years to get to a point where it’s outputting any kind of reasonable supply and in that time prices could (and hopefully will) return to a much thinner margin
Apple could, for example, start up a fab. They have the cash. But it’s a lot of cash, it doesn’t stop (the fab needs continual significant investment to stay competitive), and when ram prices dive they are stuck holding the bag for this 15-20 billion dollar fab that needs several billion dollars a year to keep playing the game. This is why they stick to fabrication of things where they can differentiate (eg m series processors) and control the market. And then they can do what they’re doing right now: leverage their huge position to get far better prices than someone like valve, who’s barely a player in the hardware game, and ensure the architecture of their custom silicon maximizes ram performance (uma) and even use that influence to codesign new types of ram that align with their interests (lpddr5x)
razen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
All roads lead to poverty
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
What surprises me in all this is that multi billion dollar gaming companies never even considered intervening given how this can easily affect their bottom line.
We joke about companies being okay with everything being B2B but some industries will completely die if consumer spending collapses.
Would be nice if all their selfishness sometimes meant fighting for the consumer they make all their money from.
ravenpunk@piefed.social 2 days ago
Wild. The dream to upgrading to oled is dead
zergtoshi@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Aaaaaand it’s sold out again: ign.com/…/the-steam-deck-is-sold-out-again-even-a…
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Fun gaming machine 2027: N100 Mini-PC with integrated graphics and Linux for playing games like Rimworld.
PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This kinda kills the value proposition of a deck. Its a good machine, but struggles with high end titles. Were the performance or battery life better, I’d have overlooked the price but its still the same machine. A more powerful successor would fit this price point, not the original machine.
As long as alternatives or similar products exist at current prices, the deck will be a hard sell.
mlg@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I guess Steam Machine is basically DOA unless they delay for another solid year and a half in hopes the AI bubble pops and the production recovers before their AMD spec becomes dated.
EvasiveSpecies@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Holy shit. Just saw this last night and I am SO glad I bought mine in January, fearing the spike in RAM prices.
titanicx@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
There goes my chance to own one.
iamthetot@piefed.ca 1 day ago
Prices in Canada are insane. So much for an OLED upgrade.
nullify3112@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think that’s it’s a slap in the face to remind us all that Valve is a for profit company.
They are supporting Linux, they make repairable hardware, proton is amazing, but they’re doing it so they can own the full stack and not have to deal with another party’s transaction fees when selling games.
They aren’t going to sell a product if they don’t make a profit. They want to make more profit. They have the potential to enshitify at any moment. We can all be excited about Steam hardware but how is it different than Apple locking its customers in a walled garden?
What happens if they decide to make all the games you bought unavailable for licensing reasons? What happens if they shut down and suddenly all your games are gone? What happens if they lock their hardware?
Anchorxiety@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Not worth it anymore. Underpowered and outdated IMO.
magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
So the frame is either gonna be two grand or just cancelled I guess lmao.
Soulifix@piefed.world 1 day ago
Yeah, Valve looking out for you gamers, aren’t they? Not so favorable now, aren’t they? lol
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I just…
Its such a weird place to be in life to have bought technology years ago and to have it be more valuable now than it used to be. I don’t think I’d would have bought a steam deck at this pricepoint, whereas I bought two at the lower price point (the LED, then the OLED)
mesamunefire@piefed.social 1 day ago
My laptop is worth more than i bought it 3 years ago. Strange world.
takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Wait until that imbecile will let China take over Taiwan.
Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Turns out I should have bought an OLED even though I already had the first version…
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Image
CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Protip, anything you want, just in general - get it “now”. Especially if you’re in the US, there will never be a better time. We’ve not yet begun to feel the supply chain impacts from Iran. Shit’s fucked, it’s not slowing down, and there’s no wand that can wave to fix it.
chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Eh, I didn’t go for the OLED upgrade and I’m still stoked about mine.
CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I was an OG pre-order and this price point would have been a big fat hell nah from me. Even more true 4+ years later.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I was just looking up strix halo prices because I want another processing machine. The framework platform I was looking at last year is 1200 more expensive (just the base price) than last year.
The 128gb variant was $1999 to start with last year… frame.work/products/…/new
lemmyng@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Same, and I too bought the LED and OLED. I sold my LED for $420 (with the new 1 TB SSD from the OLED I bought, added back grips and the original dock) to my friend cause he wanted to get one for his brother.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I gave the LED one to my partner and now we can play cozy games side by side in bed.