PlayStation and Xbox have both instituted price increases, and Nintendo’s Switch 2 will see a hike later this year.
Valve raised the prices of its Steam Deck OLED handheld gaming consoles on Wednesday by as much as $300, the company announced, citing rising memory and storage costs, the latest in a string of price increases sweeping across the gaming hardware industry.
The 512GB OLED model now costs $789, up from $549, a jump of $240. The 1TB model climbed even higher, a $300 jump from $649 to $949.
Valve said the hardware itself has not changed.
“These new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole,” the company wrote in a blog post. Certified refurbished models, including the older LCD version, remain available at lower price points.
Over the past several months, a global memory shortage driven by explosive demand from AI data centers has sent RAM and storage prices skyrocketing across consumer electronics, a trend the tech industry has dubbed “RAMageddon.”
Valve is far from alone. Sony raised prices on the PS5 earlier this year, pushing the standard disc and digital editions to $649.99 and the PS5 Pro to $899.99. The PlayStation Portal remote player also climbed to $249.99. Microsoft raised Xbox console prices twice in 2025. Lenovo’s Legion Go 2 handheld, which launched at $1,099 last October, saw its top-end 2TB configuration temporarily surge to nearly $2,850 — a 92% increase — after component costs spiked. Nintendo’s Switch 2 gaming console is rising from $449.99 to $499.99 in the United States, effective in September.
The root cause, according to multiple analysts, is a structural shift in how memory chips are allocated. One report indicated that OpenAI alone reserved as much as 40% of worldwide RAM at one point in 2025. Mainstream PC memory and storage costs rose between 40% and 70% in 2025, according to technology research firm Omdia, with further increases expected. Samsung said it has sold out all of its memory production capacity for the rest of this year and warned RAM shortages will get worse in 2027.
Valve said it would keep customers updated “if anything changes.”