Right, let’s get into it. This is a rant about how mad handheld gaming prices have become, wrapped around a confession that I’ve used my Steam Deck more than my actual gaming PC. Genuinely more. But if you’re here wondering whether you should buy a Steam Deck today, at today’s prices, my honest answer is probably not, and that’s not a sentence I ever expected to type.
Quick answer first, for anyone who just wants the numbers. A Steam Deck OLED in the UK now starts at £649 for the 512GB model, rising to £849 for the 1TB version. Valve quietly pushed those prices up by around a third in May 2026, and didn’t say much beyond pointing at rising component costs and general supply chain trouble. The old £349 entry-level LCD model, the one that made the Deck a household name in the first place, has been discontinued outright. There’s no “cheap” Steam Deck any more. There’s just Steam Deck, and it costs what a decent laptop used to.
The device that quietly out-performed my gaming PC
I want to give the Deck its dues before I start throwing rocks at its price tag, because it’s earned that much.
I bought mine expecting a novelty, something for train journeys that would gather dust within a month as most gadgets do. Instead it became the thing I reach for most evenings, propped up on a stand or docked to the telly, running everything from tiny indie games to titles I genuinely didn’t expect a handheld to cope with. My gaming PC, the one with the graphics card that cost more than the Deck itself, mostly just sits there looking expensive these days.
That’s not about raw power, obviously. My PC would flatten the Deck in any benchmark without breaking a sweat. It’s about friction, or the total lack of it. The Deck is just there, on in seconds, playable slumped on the sofa in a way a desktop tower never quite manages. Valve built something genuinely useful rather than just impressive on a spec sheet, and that’s rarer than it sounds.
So why wouldn’t I buy one now
This is where the actual rant starts.
At £349, the Steam Deck was a slightly cheeky impulse buy, the kind of thing you could talk yourself into over a lunch break. At £649, it’s a considered purchase you’re weighing up against a month of bills, and that changes everything about how it feels to buy one. A 35% jump on the OLED models in a single announcement, with barely an explanation beyond a nod to rising costs, isn’t a small adjustment. It’s a different product category wearing the same name.
What worries me more is that it’s not just Valve. Look at the rest of the handheld market, and the story repeats everywhere you turn. The ROG Xbox Ally X launched at £799.99. Lenovo’s Legion Go 2 starts at £899 and climbs to £1,099 for the version with the proper chip inside it. The MSI Claw A8 sits around £850. These aren’t outliers any more; they’re just the going rate. So the worry that future handhelds are going to easily be over £1k isn’t really a future worry at all. It’s already happened. The only open question is whether £1k ends up being the floor rather than the ceiling.
Why hardware prices are actually going up
This is the bit people keep getting wrong in comment sections, so let’s sort it out properly.
It’s not tariffs on their own, and it’s not simply manufacturers getting greedy, though nobody’s turning down the extra margin. The real driver is memory. RAM and NAND flash storage, the stuff every single one of these devices needs by the bucketload, has become eye-wateringly expensive because of AI data centres. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron between them make almost all the world’s memory chips, and they’ve been shifting factory capacity away from the everyday DDR5 that goes into your PC or handheld and towards high-bandwidth memory for AI servers instead, because that earns them two to three times the margin per wafer.
The numbers make it obvious why. A 32GB DDR5 kit that would’ve cost you somewhere around £70 to £100 a year ago is now going for £250 to £300 or more, depending on the day you check. Handhelds get hit particularly hard because they can’t dodge the problem the way a desktop sometimes can. You can’t wait for a sale on a different brand of memory stick when the RAM is soldered straight onto the board, which it is on every device I’ve mentioned so far.
Micron has already stopped bothering with consumer memory under its Crucial brand entirely, choosing to chase the AI money instead. Even Nintendo isn’t immune. Switch 2 pricing is going up in the US from September, with memory costs named as the main culprit, and the UK figure hadn’t even been confirmed as I was writing this. That’s a mainstream console, not a premium PC handheld, catching the same problem. Nobody serious expects a quick fix either. Most forecasts point towards 2027 or 2028 before things meaningfully loosen up, so when Valve mutters something about component costs, they’re not making excuses. They’re just as stuck as the rest of us.
What can actually be done about it
Not a huge amount, if I’m honest, but not nothing either.
On the personal level, the sensible move is to stop chasing the newest, shiniest configuration and buy further down the range. The base spec of whatever handheld you’re eyeing up is nearly always the smarter buy right now, since jumping up to bigger storage or a beefier chip carries a memory-shortage tax on top of the usual premium. Refurbished stock is worth a proper look too. Valve sells its own refurbished Steam Decks at a decent discount to new units, and buying refurbished from a reputable seller is a perfectly sensible way to sidestep some of this madness.
Past that, it’s mostly about patience and managing your own expectations. If you don’t need a handheld this month, holding off isn’t a daft idea, though I won’t pretend prices are obviously about to fall, because everything I’ve read points the other way. What’s completely out of any individual buyer’s hands is the AI side of things. None of us is going to talk Samsung out of building more high-bandwidth memory for data centres. The realistic response is just to budget accordingly, lean towards secondhand and refurbished where you can, and accept that “budget handheld” isn’t really a category that exists in 2026 any more.
The bit that annoys me most
This is where the hardware rant turns into a software one, because honestly the two are connected whether developers want to admit it or not.
If handhelds and PCs are going to keep costing this much, the least the games running on them could do is respect the hardware people actually own, rather than being built for a fantasy machine that only exists in a review sample. Too many recent releases ship assuming everyone will lean on upscaling and frame generation just to hit a stable 60fps, rather than treating those tools as the bonus they were originally meant to be. Hardware reviewers have been fairly blunt about frame generation for good reason, since it’s inventing frames rather than rendering them, and it doesn’t make a game any more responsive no matter what the marketing slide claims.
On a desktop with a top-tier graphics card, that’s an annoyance you can mostly brute-force your way past by throwing more silicon at it. On a handheld running on a fraction of the power, with a battery to think about as well, there’s no brute-forcing anything. A poorly optimised game just runs badly, full stop, and no amount of upscaling trickery fixes that if the underlying code was never built with any restraint in the first place. I miss when “optimisation” meant actually profiling a game and fixing the slow bits, rather than shipping something unfinished and pointing at an upscaler to paper over the cracks.
The takeaway
Buy a handheld if you know you’ll actually use it the way I use mine, which is constantly, treating it as a main device rather than a novelty that ends up in a drawer. If that’s you, it’s still worth the money even at these new prices, because mine has paid for itself in hours played several times over.
If you’re on the fence, go in with your eyes open. These prices aren’t a blip; they’re tied to a memory shortage with no quick fix in sight, so budget for the handheld market as it genuinely is now, not as it was back in 2022. And if developers want to keep selling games to people who just paid £849 for a handheld, optimising the thing properly before launch would be a good place to start, rather than leaving an upscaler to do all the heavy lifting.
Steam Deck 2, whenever it finally turns up, had better come with a small defibrillator for my bank balance.
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Join the Discussion
Are you still clinging onto a Steam Deck bought back when £349 felt like a fair price, wincing every time you see the new figures? Or have you already taken the plunge on one of the £1k-plus handhelds and decided it was worth it anyway? I'd genuinely like to know whether anyone out there thinks these prices are fair, because from where I'm sat, it's getting hard to justify.