For a brief, shining moment, you could buy a $399 device and play basically any game you wanted while lying on your couch. The Steam Deck launched in 2022, making PC gaming portable and, more importantly, affordable. Your author spent a shocking amount of time playing Elden Ring on one, marveling that a world that vast could fit comfortably between two human hands.
That was then. Today, that same Steam Deck experience starts at $789 - nearly double the original price. Nintendo, not to be outdone, is pushing its handheld gaming experience to $499 with the Switch 2, which is more than a disc-less PS5 cost at launch. You might argue that everything costs more now - welcome to RAMageddon, tariffs, and rising oil prices due to Trump's war on Iran - but the handheld market was supposed to be the affordable alternative.
"Console gaming is continuing its slow and steady march towards becoming a niche, luxury good," noted The Verge's Andrew Webster, observing that Sony and Microsoft have hiked prices multiple times while Nintendo held out. (He also noted that buying games is getting more confusing and expensive - remember when consoles used to drop in price?)
Desktop PC gamers are also panicking as RAM and storage prices skyrocket and chipmakers chase AI servers. Nvidia isn't even officially a gaming company anymore. But handhelds hit different: they were the affordable alternative, and they barely had time to bask in the sun.
No serious competitor emerged to challenge Valve or Nintendo on price. When Microsoft finally woke up to the Steam Deck's threat of pushing Windows gamers toward Linux, it priced the Xbox Ally X at $1,000 instead of $400 - treating it like a PC rather than a console. At $789, the Steam Deck may no longer threaten Microsoft's Windows gaming dominance, but it does make that $1,000 Ally X look reasonable by comparison.
Every other handheld gaming PC costs even more: the Lenovo Legion Go S is nearly double its launch price at $1,579.99, the Legion Go 2 approaches $2,000, and 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 it occasionally appears on sale for a mere $1,099).
At these prices, the product has fundamentally changed. It's no longer "you can afford to try a handheld and experience the joy of gaming everywhere." It's "you probably have to choose a handheld instead of something else." And that zero-sum thinking may impact value in other ways: Sony reportedly won't bring its big single-player games to PC anymore, taking that ball and going home.
When your author bought a Steam Deck in 2022, they weren't sure it would pay off. But it only cost $400 - not pocket change, but not rent money either. They know they wouldn't have bought a $1,000 handheld back then. They're torn on whether they would now.