For a few glorious years, a $399 portable gadget can run almost anything you want it to run. In 2022, Steam Deck finally makes PC gaming portable And affordable. i played through most alden ring On the Steam Deck, such a rich world could comfortably fit between my two hands.
Today, the Steam Deck Experience starts at $789 – almost double the price.
Similarly, a Nintendo Switch was priced at $299 at launch – but following Nintendo’s Switch 2 upgrade and “changing market conditions,” the starting price of today’s Nintendo handheld gaming experience will soon be $499, which is more than the disc-less PS5 cost at launch.
you can say So what: Doesn’t everything cost more right now? Welcome to Ramageddon, tariffs and rising oil prices due to Trump’s war on Iran. And I can’t entirely blame Nintendo or Valve. Heck, I give them credit for being one of the last people to raise prices.
“Console gaming continues its slow and steady march toward becoming a niche, luxury commodity,” my colleague Andrew Webster wrote earlier this month, pointing out how Sony and Microsoft have both raised prices several times and Nintendo was one of the last holdouts. (He also wrote about how everything about buying games is becoming more confusing and expensive – and remember when the price of game consoles used to go down instead of up?)
Meanwhile, desktop PC gamers are starting to worry that their hobby may never be affordable, now that RAM and storage prices are skyrocketing and every chip maker is chasing AI servers. (Nvidia isn’t even officially a gaming company anymore.)
But handheld has a different effect. They were supposed to be affordable alternatives to consoles and PCs, and I can’t help but be sad that they had so little time in the full sun.
There was also not enough time for a true Valve or Nintendo competitor to emerge – no other manufacturer ever meaningfully challenged them on price, ceding the market accordingly. When Microsoft finally woke up to the threat the Steam deck posed to push Windows gamers to Linux, it did so at $1,000 instead of $400, Xbox Ally
At $789 instead of $399, the Steam Deck may no longer be a threat to Microsoft’s dominance of Windows gaming. For those with extra cash, this $1,000 Microsoft/Asus Xbox Ally
Every other handheld gaming PC now costs even more: the Lenovo Legion Go S is almost double its launch price, at a staggering $1,579.99, the Legion Go 2 costs nearly $2,000 with the same chip as the Xbox One X, and leaked retail listings suggest Intel’s new handheld platform won’t be much cheaper. The MSI Claw 8 AI Plus has gone from $1,000 to $1,299 (though I still see it on sale for “only” $1,099).
In today’s world at these prices, we are no longer talking about a one-and-done product. It’s no longer “you can’t afford to try a handheld and experience the joy of gaming everywhere.” It’s “You’ll probably want to choose a handheld instead of something else.”
This kind of zero-sum thinking could affect the value of these handhelds in other ways, too – one of the joys of the Steam Deck was how it made the PlayStation’s biggest games portable, but Sony reportedly won’t be bringing its big single-player games to PC anymore. It’s taking that ball and going home.
When I bought my Steam Deck in 2022, I wasn’t sure it would get so much use out of it, that I would actually become a handheld gamer again. I already had a perfectly good homebuilt PC.
But I didn’t need convincing. It only cost $400. It’s not pocket money – but it’s not rent money either. I know I wouldn’t have bought a $1,000 handheld back then. I am unsure whether I will do this now.
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