The Steam Deck OLED has been largely off the shelves since mid-February, being among the casualties of the RAM and storage shortage that has been driving up prices across consumer tech since late 2025.
It recently came back on May 27, just not at the prices everyone was hoping for.
Valve bumped the pricing for the 512GB OLED from $549 to $789 and the 1TB model from $649 to $949; that is a near-50% jump on the top model, btw. The cheaper LCD variant is gone entirely, having been discontinued before any of this played out.
The company announced the price hike by saying that the "Steam Deck itself hasn't changed; these new prices reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole."
Gone in under 24 hours
People bought them anyway. North America sold out in under 24 hours, price hike and all. You would think an absurd jump in prices on a two-and-a-half-year-old handheld would give people some concern, but apparently not.
Valve's store page warns that the Steam Deck OLED "may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages." That warning is not new, and going by how things have played out since February, it is not decorative either.
The handheld has been in and out of stock so unpredictably that catching it at the right moment has been more luck than anything else.
Back now
As of writing, both OLED models are showing as available in North America. I checked the Steam store and was able to add both to the cart without issue, with an estimated delivery window of 6-10 business days.
Whether that holds is another question entirely. 😵
For the rest of the world, the Europe, Australia, and Asia markets are served through Valve's partner Komodo, who have reportedly seen better stock ups than North America throughout this period, though that too keeps shifting.
Why this keeps happening
The RAM and SSD shortage that took hold in late 2025 is the main culprit. AI infrastructure has been consuming memory and storage at a pace that the consumer market is still processing, with prices unlikely to normalize any time soon.
It is not just Valve feeling this either.
Only yesterday, we covered how Raspberry Pi pushed through another round of price hikes in April, citing a seven-fold rise in LPDDR4 costs over the past year. The Raspberry Pi 6 itself has been pushed out to 2028 at the earliest, partly because of where the memory market sits.
For anyone holding out for better prices or more reliable stock, the situation does not look like it will improve anytime soon. And maybe that kind of sentiment is precisely why the Steam Deck OLED is going out of stock so quickly?
