Steam Deck price hike sparks fears that Steam Machine will be dead on arrival

Last night in a shocking announcement, Valve raised Steam Deck prices by 50%, bringing the 2TB OLED model up to just shy of $1000. I'm a big fan of the Steam Deck and have recommended it many times over the years, but at this point, pricing is so out of hand that I actually think Valve should just cancel all of its hardware plans. 

There is absolutely no world where I would be comfortable normalising a near $1000 price tag for a handheld at the performance level of the Steam Deck. With the RAM shortage impacting the Steam Deck this badly, I now fear just how much the Steam Machine is going to cost. When the system was first announced and we began hearing that it would cost ‘more than a console', my gut feeling was that the Steam Machine would be priced at $999 in a worst-case scenario. The Steam Deck price hike shows me that we are far past my own estimates.

Brad Lynch, a Valve-focused gamer who has previously leaked things like Counter-Strike 2, has said that he heard months ago that the Steam Machine would be priced higher than the new Steam Deck price. If true, then Valve has lost the plot and I wouldn't recommend that anyone purchase one. The Steam Machine already has very low-grade specs, the sort of spec we would expect to see in the cheapest gaming laptop. We absolutely cannot normalise such high prices for such weak hardware, whether there is a RAM shortage or not.

With prices seemingly reaching an absolutely ridiculous degree, the pool of potential customers for Valve to sell to is getting smaller and smaller. At $1000, the Steam Machine would have been a tough sell but enthusiasts still would have stepped up, but at $1200 and potentially even more than that, I don't see a scenario where any enthusiast would buy one. At that point, you could buy a current-gen console and several full-priced games to go with it, so you aren't going to win over the console player. Meanwhile, PC enthusiasts would rather use that kind of money to build their own DIY system with better specs.

KitGuru Says: At a certain point, the price just becomes so prohibitive that there is no market left. This clearly isn't going to grow the PC gaming audience, or Valve's Steam user base, so what's the point? 

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