The only good side is that people are gonna replace their machines less often and that developpers might look at making games playable on less powerful hardware.
The gamers who are really in trouble are the ones without a PC, a console or whatever yet. Or the ones with hardware on the verge of failing…
I think it can have benefits for the gaming industry in a way.
In such difficult times, people are still getting rid of perfectly working PC because these don’t have the requirements for Windows 11.
My company gets us a new iPhone every 3 years when we could keep them for way longer.
All of this can be good for Linux and optimisation, even if the situation is clearly not ideal.
I love my original 512GB LCD Deck and I’ve been encouraging a lot of people to get one every since it came out.
However… at the current price point it just doesn’t make sense. Right now you can buy Snapdragon 8 Elite handhelds for less than half of a Steam Deck’s price. Or an Ayaneo Konkr Fit with much better specs and almost 2x larger battery for $999.
Everything is getting more expensive, but at this price I couldn’t recommend anyone a Steam Deck with a clear conscience.
This kinda kills the value proposition of a deck. Its a good machine, but struggles with high end titles. Were the performance or battery life better, I’d have overlooked the price but its still the same machine. A more powerful successor would fit this price point, not the original machine.
As long as alternatives or similar products exist at current prices, the deck will be a hard sell.
I think you shouldn’t buy a steam deck and instead save that money. It looks to me that there will be more and more inflation and food may start to become real expensive, specially if hormuz doesn’t open up and fertilizer can’t get through. Trump will never open Hormuz because it’s part of the American strategy to keep it closed.
We are in the stage where all the systems are being broken intentionally, so buying a steam deck now… Seems misguided. You may need that money for food. Or your parents may need it.
Im still on a computer from 2017 but luckily with upgraded memory and graphics card from before this shit started, so it runs games very good.
Food is already going to go up in the future even if they opened the Straits today. Crops have sowing and harvesting seasons. Miss the sowing season because of a lack of fertiliser and you’ve no harvest. And those windows for sowing are fixed and known, you can’t just go “oh I’ve got fertiliser now so I can go plant my crops.” If you’re out of the sowing window you can plant the seed but it’s not going to germinate and grow. And for a lot of crops we’re in the middle of that season right now.
I guess Steam Machine is basically DOA unless they delay for another solid year and a half in hopes the AI bubble pops and the production recovers before their AMD spec becomes dated.
Yeah, and they’re probably not making much profit on it. The cost of components is ludicrous.
They’re kind of fucked with the steam machine & frame. Unless they can source cheap components they’ll probably have to price the things so high it pretty much ensures these products are DOA. I dunno, maybe they’ll keep delaying release.
Edit - I just checked, the prices have not gone up in my region, at least not yet. And they’re actually available again.
Why is making enough RAM to go around so hard now? I know the cause of it - AI cunts - but what is the actual bottleneck in the production of RAM that means it can’t be pumped out fast enough to meet demand?
The fact that it’s extremely specialised equipment that’s needed to make the chips of which there is a limited supply due to there being basically only one manufacturer of lithography capable of making chips at the nanometer level that is required, and the factories that produce chips are extremely complicated to make. And you can’t just make more machinery to make the chips because they require rare earth materials, China controls most of the global market for rare earth minerals and because of Trump they’re rationing them.
ram is a volatile commodity that, while difficult to manufacture, is not as difficult as say a gpu or cpu. As a result in the past manufacturers have been pushed to sell supplies at or even below cost. It seems like a no brainer to start up a new fab right now but the reality is that would take years to get to a point where it’s outputting any kind of reasonable supply and in that time prices could (and hopefully will) return to a much thinner margin
Apple could, for example, start up a fab. They have the cash. But it’s a lot of cash, it doesn’t stop (the fab needs continual significant investment to stay competitive), and when ram prices dive they are stuck holding the bag for this 15-20 billion dollar fab that needs several billion dollars a year to keep playing the game. This is why they stick to fabrication of things where they can differentiate (eg m series processors) and control the market. And then they can do what they’re doing right now: leverage their huge position to get far better prices than someone like valve, who’s barely a player in the hardware game, and ensure the architecture of their custom silicon maximizes ram performance (uma) and even use that influence to codesign new types of ram that align with their interests (lpddr5x)
AI’s demand for memory is pretty difficult to really get across because there’s a lot of complex factors, but whatever you can imagine is the demand, it’s higher than that.
You can look at pre and post AI to get a slightly better picture, but then the numbers don’t look terrible and so the demand isn’t as clear.
2020-2023 primary customers were smartphones, laptops, PC. Data centers were eating about 32% of the global market for RAM. Monolithic DDR4/DDR5 was the main product and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) was about 8%. Total memory set being sold was like 16GB kits to 64GB kits, obviously server kits were going out, just the majority was those mostly for PCs.
2025 hits and the primary customer is AI Data Centers. To put it at scale, you have literally everything that uses memory (and I mean literally every fucking thing on this planet) and AI Data Centers. And the break between those two bins are 30% and 70%. AI data centers are consuming more than twice the memory of literally everything combined that uses RAM that isn’t an AI data center.
The primary RAM being made now is HBM, which is way more complex. 23% of all the wafers that will be used to make integrated circuits will be HBM RAM. And by wafers, I mean all the chips that will be made this year, lock, stock, and barrel. If you randomly picked up a wafer out of a fab you have a almost 1 in 4 chance to pick up RAM. And finally the average kit going out is 1TB to 2TB kits, which is a lot more than the old 16GB to 64GB kits.
Now I mention HBM because it eats more wafer, that’s because unlike DDR4/5 RAM, HBM RAM is a three-dimensional circuit. 12 to 16 layers of silicon is stacked on top of each other. So HBM consumes about 300% more silicon than other memory (not every layer is one-to-one in size). So you don’t just have one fab making chips, you have several fabs making the layers.
The next thing is that building fabs is complex. I hate trying to explain the complexity, but you can’t do it overnight. Usually you have to build these things over the course of five years. Just to give you some idea of how technical the construction is. If you had a road within 500 feet of a chip fabricator sitting on a regular concrete floor, the car driving on the road would create enough shakiness in the Earth to cause the chip fabricator to bounce around too much. So when they build the place that have to literally isolate the small earth quakes humans walking around inside the place cause. This requires very complex floor building. And this is just the floor, not to mention how clean the place has to be kept, isolated as much as possible atmosphere, literally specific sections are under vacuum. It’s massively complex to build ONE of these.
The complexity comes with a price tag. Average cost to build one memory making factory is around $15B to $20B. It’s serious cash, but even if you have 5 years and $20B, there’s a specific bottleneck. ASML. ASML is the only company on the entire face of the Earth that makes the chip making machines. They’ve indicated that if you ordered a machine today, you can expect it roughly 1½ to 2 years from now. That’s how many people have put in an order for the machines to make memory.
So all that aside, there’s one more bottleneck. HBM has to be stacked in layers, there are very few people on this planet that can do that, and they have years long backlog. And even then, most times the stacking fails. About 30% to 50% of all HBM is trashed because the layers fell apart. And the people who stack are entirely different people than the layer makers. But they’re the same people that take that DDR4/5 wafer and cap it into that little black rectangle you see on your sticks of memory. So they have pretty much ~100% of their employees doing nothing but stacking layers of memory together.
Another thing is economic prioritization, HBM is about 500% more than DDR4/5’s price tag per GB. A fab producing wafers of DDR4/5 is making about $x.xx. A fab producing a couple of the layers for HBM is making about 500% × $x.xx on average (it’s complicated because of the layers), even with the stacking issues. And the profit margin on HBM is 70% versus DDR4/5 before AI which was fingernail thin. SK Hynix was actually taking a loss on production of DDR5 at about -1.6%. So going from -1.6% to 70% profit has created a crowding out effect. Not to mention that since there was a bit of a bleeding out period after COVID, some literally stopped making RAM. Which has made the issue even worse.
The last thing before I run out of characters is the AI growth. AI needs about 300% more memory every ten months. That’s how fast these models are growing. That’s caused a panic buying and also caused a rushing to fulfill. The industry is losing it’s collective mind because the money to be made is big and so lots think it can’t last and trying to get their cut before the gravy train derails.
So when they build the place that have to literally isolate the small earth quakes humans walking around inside the place cause. This requires very complex floor building
first, thank you for your comment. i love learning stuff like this. you reminded me of an earthquake exhibit i saw at my favorite museum ages ago on how they put counterweights in roofs of towers to help protect against Untimely Shakey Falley Downey Syndrome, or earthquakes as scientoasts call them. i was really too young to understand all of it at 6 but the general mechanics were cool.
Its also not the first pig cycle in the memory industry. There used to be over 20 manufacturers producing ram. These three survived because they didn’t massively ramp up production when demand increased. So they’ve collectively said, we are not really investing into production.
The short version is imagine the world has a production capability of X sticks of RAM per day. Up until now it consumed X sticks of RAM and all was good. Suddenly a new player enters the market that requires Y sticks of RAM and is willing to pay a lot more than everyone else, now the total amount of RAM is X-Y (and just to give you an idea of the size of the problem Y is approximately 40% of X). Factories might start working more and try to produce more, and they might increase productivity by Z, but if Z<Y we’re still in a deficit so we have over demand and lack of production. RAM factories are not made overnight, so it takes months if not years to open new ones and bump the amount that’s actually able to be produced.
It will pass, lots of companies are rushing to open more factories, China has started producing RAM too, plus the new player that was buying Y before and signed to do so for months to come is trying to buy less now.
There are very few places on earth that are capable of producing the silicon wafers used in RAM. These factories are still producing at the same rate as before but buyers who pay more (large companies with data centers) are buying them so there are fewer left over for normal consumers (hence the high prices). So why not scale up by making the factories bigger or faster? They are, it will take decades to do that because the process is so advanced. Why not just scale out by building more factories for producing the parts? They are, but that too will take decades.
I’m not going to look this up, because I’m expecting that there’s a number of reasons, but you can pretty much point the finger at supply and demand of components, as well as inability for companies to scale production, and the fact this is likely a bubble.
Think about it from the standing of a ram manufacturer. You’re already pumping out as much product as physically possible, or you need components or materials from other vendors. You aren’t just sitting on idle machines, if there’s a market what what you’re doing, you’re going to push as much of it as you can. All of a sudden, you can charge more because there’s a ram shortage, but you can’t scale up your business because with this rise there’s likely to be an equal fall in the not too distant future, and scaling up production is a slow process. Even if you did, there’s a strong possibility that you’d be restricted by other bottlenecks.
It’s a huge business risk for not much reward. Better to take the win, do what you can try maximise it without exposing yourself to potential losses.
Actually this is incorrect. The RAM manufacturers operate as a cartel and purposefully restrict the supply of RAM so they can sell less at much higher margins. They have been caught doing this 20 years ago and they are doing it again but now everyone is buying their excuse.
Other companies who did not buy out 40% of the world’s ram supply overnight intentionally causing a global panic directly leading to the scenario we are in today.
Almost like AI and data center expansion was around before October 2025 and only after that deal did ram pricing skyrocket.
What surprises me in all this is that multi billion dollar gaming companies never even considered intervening given how this can easily affect their bottom line.
We joke about companies being okay with everything being B2B but some industries will completely die if consumer spending collapses.
Would be nice if all their selfishness sometimes meant fighting for the consumer they make all their money from.
I don’t think multi billion dollars is enough to fight this behemoth. Especially when it has basically all the support of the corrupt government. It’s a suicide and everyone knows it.
It’s almost by design. Take personal computing away from the masses. Control what can be done and learned on a cloud device. More control over the masses with the benefit of a cloud computer subscription.
The US’s best export, so to speak, is it’s money. People in the US buy more than anywhere. It has a larger consumer market than EU, China, and India combined. That’s ridiculous to think about, a country of 350m outspending 3.5b. As much as I can’t stand trump and think everything is wrong, leveraging the US and it’s buying power is a tactic that makes sense. I wouldn’t even be mad if it was just part of some negotiation, but it coupled with obviously all the rest of the shit kinda changes the light that it’s shown in.
Its such a weird place to be in life to have bought technology years ago and to have it be more valuable now than it used to be. I don’t think I’d would have bought a steam deck at this pricepoint, whereas I bought two at the lower price point (the LED, then the OLED)
Protip, anything you want, just in general - get it “now”. Especially if you’re in the US, there will never be a better time. We’ve not yet begun to feel the supply chain impacts from Iran. Shit’s fucked, it’s not slowing down, and there’s no wand that can wave to fix it.
Neither did I, but lately it’s been docked since I bent a CPU pin on my regular PC and have yet to unbend it, so it’s been a temporary replacement. OLED wouldn’t have made a difference in most of its use time in my case.
I didn’t know that wasn’t originally possible. I don’t use Bluetooth with it at all though. My headset and the controller I was using both has dongles, and now I use the Steam controller with it, so no change.
The mouse and keyboard are just regular corded ones as well.
I was just looking up strix halo prices because I want another processing machine. The framework platform I was looking at last year is 1200 more expensive (just the base price) than last year.
Yeah I saw the price hike and I didn’t even bother going further with the configuration. I could do a major home improvement project at these prices. The only fear I have is that its only going to get worse.
Same, and I too bought the LED and OLED. I sold my LED for $420 (with the new 1 TB SSD from the OLED I bought, added back grips and the original dock) to my friend cause he wanted to get one for his brother.
Same, and I too bought the LED and OLED. I sold my LED for $420 (with the new 1 TB SSD from the OLED I bought, added back grips and the original dock) to my friend cause he wanted to get one for his brother.
I gave the LED one to my partner and now we can play cozy games side by side in bed.
The main reason the Steam Deck was popular to begin with was that it was a relatively affordable gaming PC in a handheld form factor. It has been getting less and less affordable as more time has gone on.
There’s better handhelds out there now, but they’re more expensive. The Lenovo legion go 2 is supposed to be good if you install bazzite or steam os on it but the top end models are like £2000
No other handhelds have the dual trackpads, symmetrical layout, and capacitive thumbsticks that the Steam Deck has, which are the selling points for me.
Totally get it. But, being real, budget is always a relative term. I wouldn’t have been able to afford the cheapest version before, period. Mine was gifted to me. Items like this are only “budget” if you actually have a budget for a one off gaming device in the first place.
I’m in the same boat as you if mine dies. No way in hell could I swing even the prices on the LCD version if they still offered them, much less the oled. It’s what? 750+ USD for the lower tier version? That’s almost my fucking mortgage. The LCD would still sit at the 600+ range most likely.
And the deck is technically a full PC if you get a dock and set it up, but that’s still a damn big outlay for a low tier PC.
So, yeah, fuck Altman and every other dipshit pushing hopped up llms like they’re the second coming.
At this stage, the price hike of the steam deck is probably more about making the price of the upcoming Steam Box and VR headset look like an easier pill to swallow, and not about actually needing to raise the price of the steam deck.
Could be both, but I think that both RAM and SSDs have gotten so expensive due to the AI bubble that even high volume manufacturers are having to raise prices by an unreasonable amount to stay profitable.
I mean, it was also popular because it was relatively open in a field of closed handhelds. You could play, basically, whatever you wanted on it. Price was a factor as well… but it was never cheap. Just less expensive than other options.
I bought an ally x about a year and a half ago. At the time it commanded a substantial premium over the OLED deck, but it had the specs to back it up. Since then the price gap has closed and Asus has released another version of the Ally. Asus isn’t the only other handheld maker in town and you can install Bazzite or Steam OS on most of the deck alternatives. Unless you want an out of the box experience that doesn’t involve windows, I am not sure the price point for four year old hardware makes any sense.
Depends how long competitors can keep their prices in that range. I assume lenovo have some economy of scale in their favor, but I think they’ll eventually be priced up and out too.
You can thank legal weed for that. Oregon weed prices have stayed pretty cool and low for a long while now. Helps that this stuff is pretty easy to grow.
Not much legal weed, were I’m from
Still the price stayed the same since now…nearly 25 years
With good connections or in bulk, it got even cheaper than before
Not sure how that works out with rising energy prices.
Maybe the switch to LEDs saved us here
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The only good side is that people are gonna replace their machines less often and that developpers might look at making games playable on less powerful hardware.
The gamers who are really in trouble are the ones without a PC, a console or whatever yet. Or the ones with hardware on the verge of failing…
I think it can have benefits for the gaming industry in a way.
In such difficult times, people are still getting rid of perfectly working PC because these don’t have the requirements for Windows 11.
My company gets us a new iPhone every 3 years when we could keep them for way longer.
All of this can be good for Linux and optimisation, even if the situation is clearly not ideal.
I love my original 512GB LCD Deck and I’ve been encouraging a lot of people to get one every since it came out.
However… at the current price point it just doesn’t make sense. Right now you can buy Snapdragon 8 Elite handhelds for less than half of a Steam Deck’s price. Or an Ayaneo Konkr Fit with much better specs and almost 2x larger battery for $999.
Everything is getting more expensive, but at this price I couldn’t recommend anyone a Steam Deck with a clear conscience.
Holy shit. Just saw this last night and I am SO glad I bought mine in January, fearing the spike in RAM prices.
This kinda kills the value proposition of a deck. Its a good machine, but struggles with high end titles. Were the performance or battery life better, I’d have overlooked the price but its still the same machine. A more powerful successor would fit this price point, not the original machine.
As long as alternatives or similar products exist at current prices, the deck will be a hard sell.
I think you shouldn’t buy a steam deck and instead save that money. It looks to me that there will be more and more inflation and food may start to become real expensive, specially if hormuz doesn’t open up and fertilizer can’t get through. Trump will never open Hormuz because it’s part of the American strategy to keep it closed.
We are in the stage where all the systems are being broken intentionally, so buying a steam deck now… Seems misguided. You may need that money for food. Or your parents may need it.
Im still on a computer from 2017 but luckily with upgraded memory and graphics card from before this shit started, so it runs games very good.
Food is already going to go up in the future even if they opened the Straits today. Crops have sowing and harvesting seasons. Miss the sowing season because of a lack of fertiliser and you’ve no harvest. And those windows for sowing are fixed and known, you can’t just go “oh I’ve got fertiliser now so I can go plant my crops.” If you’re out of the sowing window you can plant the seed but it’s not going to germinate and grow. And for a lot of crops we’re in the middle of that season right now.
Almost as if this crisis is engineered, just like all the others.
Lets see if we also get some virus crisis, I think its about time again to scare the masses.
yup. you might just say fuck it, we’re not doing corn this year we’re doing cilantro just so you don’t let the field sit fallow an entire season.
I guess Steam Machine is basically DOA unless they delay for another solid year and a half in hopes the AI bubble pops and the production recovers before their AMD spec becomes dated.
That price increase for aging hardware is ludicrous.
Yeah, and they’re probably not making much profit on it. The cost of components is ludicrous.
They’re kind of fucked with the steam machine & frame. Unless they can source cheap components they’ll probably have to price the things so high it pretty much ensures these products are DOA. I dunno, maybe they’ll keep delaying release.
Edit - I just checked, the prices have not gone up in my region, at least not yet. And they’re actually available again.
Yeah we live in a shitty dystopia thanks to Scam Fartman. Can’t wait to sell my soul for the next graphics card.
Dropping all soulless AAA titles can be fun.
c/NoStupidQuestions style question:
Why is making enough RAM to go around so hard now? I know the cause of it - AI cunts - but what is the actual bottleneck in the production of RAM that means it can’t be pumped out fast enough to meet demand?
The fact that it’s extremely specialised equipment that’s needed to make the chips of which there is a limited supply due to there being basically only one manufacturer of lithography capable of making chips at the nanometer level that is required, and the factories that produce chips are extremely complicated to make. And you can’t just make more machinery to make the chips because they require rare earth materials, China controls most of the global market for rare earth minerals and because of Trump they’re rationing them.
ram is a volatile commodity that, while difficult to manufacture, is not as difficult as say a gpu or cpu. As a result in the past manufacturers have been pushed to sell supplies at or even below cost. It seems like a no brainer to start up a new fab right now but the reality is that would take years to get to a point where it’s outputting any kind of reasonable supply and in that time prices could (and hopefully will) return to a much thinner margin
Apple could, for example, start up a fab. They have the cash. But it’s a lot of cash, it doesn’t stop (the fab needs continual significant investment to stay competitive), and when ram prices dive they are stuck holding the bag for this 15-20 billion dollar fab that needs several billion dollars a year to keep playing the game. This is why they stick to fabrication of things where they can differentiate (eg m series processors) and control the market. And then they can do what they’re doing right now: leverage their huge position to get far better prices than someone like valve, who’s barely a player in the hardware game, and ensure the architecture of their custom silicon maximizes ram performance (uma) and even use that influence to codesign new types of ram that align with their interests (lpddr5x)
deleted by creator
AI’s demand for memory is pretty difficult to really get across because there’s a lot of complex factors, but whatever you can imagine is the demand, it’s higher than that.
You can look at pre and post AI to get a slightly better picture, but then the numbers don’t look terrible and so the demand isn’t as clear.
2020-2023 primary customers were smartphones, laptops, PC. Data centers were eating about 32% of the global market for RAM. Monolithic DDR4/DDR5 was the main product and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) was about 8%. Total memory set being sold was like 16GB kits to 64GB kits, obviously server kits were going out, just the majority was those mostly for PCs.
2025 hits and the primary customer is AI Data Centers. To put it at scale, you have literally everything that uses memory (and I mean literally every fucking thing on this planet) and AI Data Centers. And the break between those two bins are 30% and 70%. AI data centers are consuming more than twice the memory of literally everything combined that uses RAM that isn’t an AI data center.
The primary RAM being made now is HBM, which is way more complex. 23% of all the wafers that will be used to make integrated circuits will be HBM RAM. And by wafers, I mean all the chips that will be made this year, lock, stock, and barrel. If you randomly picked up a wafer out of a fab you have a almost 1 in 4 chance to pick up RAM. And finally the average kit going out is 1TB to 2TB kits, which is a lot more than the old 16GB to 64GB kits.
Now I mention HBM because it eats more wafer, that’s because unlike DDR4/5 RAM, HBM RAM is a three-dimensional circuit. 12 to 16 layers of silicon is stacked on top of each other. So HBM consumes about 300% more silicon than other memory (not every layer is one-to-one in size). So you don’t just have one fab making chips, you have several fabs making the layers.
The next thing is that building fabs is complex. I hate trying to explain the complexity, but you can’t do it overnight. Usually you have to build these things over the course of five years. Just to give you some idea of how technical the construction is. If you had a road within 500 feet of a chip fabricator sitting on a regular concrete floor, the car driving on the road would create enough shakiness in the Earth to cause the chip fabricator to bounce around too much. So when they build the place that have to literally isolate the small earth quakes humans walking around inside the place cause. This requires very complex floor building. And this is just the floor, not to mention how clean the place has to be kept, isolated as much as possible atmosphere, literally specific sections are under vacuum. It’s massively complex to build ONE of these.
The complexity comes with a price tag. Average cost to build one memory making factory is around $15B to $20B. It’s serious cash, but even if you have 5 years and $20B, there’s a specific bottleneck. ASML. ASML is the only company on the entire face of the Earth that makes the chip making machines. They’ve indicated that if you ordered a machine today, you can expect it roughly 1½ to 2 years from now. That’s how many people have put in an order for the machines to make memory.
So all that aside, there’s one more bottleneck. HBM has to be stacked in layers, there are very few people on this planet that can do that, and they have years long backlog. And even then, most times the stacking fails. About 30% to 50% of all HBM is trashed because the layers fell apart. And the people who stack are entirely different people than the layer makers. But they’re the same people that take that DDR4/5 wafer and cap it into that little black rectangle you see on your sticks of memory. So they have pretty much ~100% of their employees doing nothing but stacking layers of memory together.
Another thing is economic prioritization, HBM is about 500% more than DDR4/5’s price tag per GB. A fab producing wafers of DDR4/5 is making about $x.xx. A fab producing a couple of the layers for HBM is making about 500% × $x.xx on average (it’s complicated because of the layers), even with the stacking issues. And the profit margin on HBM is 70% versus DDR4/5 before AI which was fingernail thin. SK Hynix was actually taking a loss on production of DDR5 at about -1.6%. So going from -1.6% to 70% profit has created a crowding out effect. Not to mention that since there was a bit of a bleeding out period after COVID, some literally stopped making RAM. Which has made the issue even worse.
The last thing before I run out of characters is the AI growth. AI needs about 300% more memory every ten months. That’s how fast these models are growing. That’s caused a panic buying and also caused a rushing to fulfill. The industry is losing it’s collective mind because the money to be made is big and so lots think it can’t last and trying to get their cut before the gravy train derails.
first, thank you for your comment. i love learning stuff like this. you reminded me of an earthquake exhibit i saw at my favorite museum ages ago on how they put counterweights in roofs of towers to help protect against Untimely Shakey Falley Downey Syndrome, or earthquakes as scientoasts call them. i was really too young to understand all of it at 6 but the general mechanics were cool.
Its also not the first pig cycle in the memory industry. There used to be over 20 manufacturers producing ram. These three survived because they didn’t massively ramp up production when demand increased. So they’ve collectively said, we are not really investing into production.
The short version is imagine the world has a production capability of X sticks of RAM per day. Up until now it consumed X sticks of RAM and all was good. Suddenly a new player enters the market that requires Y sticks of RAM and is willing to pay a lot more than everyone else, now the total amount of RAM is X-Y (and just to give you an idea of the size of the problem Y is approximately 40% of X). Factories might start working more and try to produce more, and they might increase productivity by Z, but if Z<Y we’re still in a deficit so we have over demand and lack of production. RAM factories are not made overnight, so it takes months if not years to open new ones and bump the amount that’s actually able to be produced.
It will pass, lots of companies are rushing to open more factories, China has started producing RAM too, plus the new player that was buying Y before and signed to do so for months to come is trying to buy less now.
There are very few places on earth that are capable of producing the silicon wafers used in RAM. These factories are still producing at the same rate as before but buyers who pay more (large companies with data centers) are buying them so there are fewer left over for normal consumers (hence the high prices). So why not scale up by making the factories bigger or faster? They are, it will take decades to do that because the process is so advanced. Why not just scale out by building more factories for producing the parts? They are, but that too will take decades.
I’m not going to look this up, because I’m expecting that there’s a number of reasons, but you can pretty much point the finger at supply and demand of components, as well as inability for companies to scale production, and the fact this is likely a bubble.
Think about it from the standing of a ram manufacturer. You’re already pumping out as much product as physically possible, or you need components or materials from other vendors. You aren’t just sitting on idle machines, if there’s a market what what you’re doing, you’re going to push as much of it as you can. All of a sudden, you can charge more because there’s a ram shortage, but you can’t scale up your business because with this rise there’s likely to be an equal fall in the not too distant future, and scaling up production is a slow process. Even if you did, there’s a strong possibility that you’d be restricted by other bottlenecks.
It’s a huge business risk for not much reward. Better to take the win, do what you can try maximise it without exposing yourself to potential losses.
Actually this is incorrect. The RAM manufacturers operate as a cartel and purposefully restrict the supply of RAM so they can sell less at much higher margins. They have been caught doing this 20 years ago and they are doing it again but now everyone is buying their excuse.
Correct. They’re also manufacturing slightly less than they did the year prior iirc.
Europe: 512GB OLED went from €
569to €779 (+€210, +37%), and 1TB OLED from €679to €919 (+€240, +35%).I really like the Deck, but I wouldn’t recommend it at these prices, and the price increase is just bonkers even for the crazy times we live in.
That is SO not worth it. Everything is completely fucked. Guillotining Sam Altman may not drop prices, but I still think it’s a terrific fucking idea.
Of all the people to guillotine and for all the reasons… He is fairly far down the list. Still on the list, but not first…
he’s just on the list for fun, like guillotining the piss boy
It’s just a test run to make sure the guillotine is not faulty
Thanks “AI”
Thanks OpenAI*
There are other AI companies as well.
Other companies who did not buy out 40% of the world’s ram supply overnight intentionally causing a global panic directly leading to the scenario we are in today.
Almost like AI and data center expansion was around before October 2025 and only after that deal did ram pricing skyrocket.
https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal
Thanks Gabe.
All things go up except salaries…
Don’t forget the body count!
What surprises me in all this is that multi billion dollar gaming companies never even considered intervening given how this can easily affect their bottom line.
We joke about companies being okay with everything being B2B but some industries will completely die if consumer spending collapses.
Would be nice if all their selfishness sometimes meant fighting for the consumer they make all their money from.
I don’t think multi billion dollars is enough to fight this behemoth. Especially when it has basically all the support of the corrupt government. It’s a suicide and everyone knows it.
https://youtu.be/zyQwAhppWj8
It’s almost by design. Take personal computing away from the masses. Control what can be done and learned on a cloud device. More control over the masses with the benefit of a cloud computer subscription.
Consumer spending is something like 68% of the US economy. I suspect that’s the case in most countries?
Consumer spending drives the US economy.
The US’s best export, so to speak, is it’s money. People in the US buy more than anywhere. It has a larger consumer market than EU, China, and India combined. That’s ridiculous to think about, a country of 350m outspending 3.5b. As much as I can’t stand trump and think everything is wrong, leveraging the US and it’s buying power is a tactic that makes sense. I wouldn’t even be mad if it was just part of some negotiation, but it coupled with obviously all the rest of the shit kinda changes the light that it’s shown in.
Kinda has to be for wealth to trickle up. I think they might have meant discretionary consumer spending.
I just…
Its such a weird place to be in life to have bought technology years ago and to have it be more valuable now than it used to be. I don’t think I’d would have bought a steam deck at this pricepoint, whereas I bought two at the lower price point (the LED, then the OLED)
Turns out I should have bought an OLED even though I already had the first version…
Protip, anything you want, just in general - get it “now”. Especially if you’re in the US, there will never be a better time. We’ve not yet begun to feel the supply chain impacts from Iran. Shit’s fucked, it’s not slowing down, and there’s no wand that can wave to fix it.
Yep, been buying used kindles for cheap and jailbreaking them, set for reading forever, and sd cards and hard drives. Let it ride.
Yeah I got some storage already. I think I’ll get some more if I see a “discount”
Eh, I didn’t go for the OLED upgrade and I’m still stoked about mine.
Neither did I, but lately it’s been docked since I bent a CPU pin on my regular PC and have yet to unbend it, so it’s been a temporary replacement. OLED wouldn’t have made a difference in most of its use time in my case.
Was using mine docked as well for a couple weeks while I waited for my RMAs to go through. Went really well.
Just wake from Bluetooth. Which is honestly crazy they didn’t include it to begin with.
I didn’t know that wasn’t originally possible. I don’t use Bluetooth with it at all though. My headset and the controller I was using both has dongles, and now I use the Steam controller with it, so no change.
The mouse and keyboard are just regular corded ones as well.
My laptop is worth more than i bought it 3 years ago. Strange world.
Wait until that imbecile will let China take over Taiwan.
I was an OG pre-order and this price point would have been a big fat hell nah from me. Even more true 4+ years later.
I was just looking up strix halo prices because I want another processing machine. The framework platform I was looking at last year is 1200 more expensive (just the base price) than last year.
The 128gb variant was $1999 to start with last year… https://frame.work/products/desktop-diy-amd-aimax300/configuration/new
And that’s not counting the NVMe, which also has seen major increases in market price.
I got a 128GB version last year with an 8TB NVMe drive. Was, IIRC, $2,500 at that point.
Now it’s $4,178.
Yeah I saw the price hike and I didn’t even bother going further with the configuration. I could do a major home improvement project at these prices. The only fear I have is that its only going to get worse.
Same, and I too bought the LED and OLED. I sold my LED for $420 (with the new 1 TB SSD from the OLED I bought, added back grips and the original dock) to my friend cause he wanted to get one for his brother.
I gave the LED one to my partner and now we can play cozy games side by side in bed.
The main reason the Steam Deck was popular to begin with was that it was a relatively affordable gaming PC in a handheld form factor. It has been getting less and less affordable as more time has gone on.
Going to be a very tough sell from now on.
There’s better handhelds out there now, but they’re more expensive. The Lenovo legion go 2 is supposed to be good if you install bazzite or steam os on it but the top end models are like £2000
No other handhelds have the dual trackpads, symmetrical layout, and capacitive thumbsticks that the Steam Deck has, which are the selling points for me.
Yeah fair point. I doubt they’d meet the deck’s ergonomic quality either.
Not if everyone else goes up too
That doesn’t magically give me money to buy any alternatives with.
All this shit is Sam Altman’s fault, slimy fuck
Totally get it. But, being real, budget is always a relative term. I wouldn’t have been able to afford the cheapest version before, period. Mine was gifted to me. Items like this are only “budget” if you actually have a budget for a one off gaming device in the first place.
I’m in the same boat as you if mine dies. No way in hell could I swing even the prices on the LCD version if they still offered them, much less the oled. It’s what? 750+ USD for the lower tier version? That’s almost my fucking mortgage. The LCD would still sit at the 600+ range most likely.
And the deck is technically a full PC if you get a dock and set it up, but that’s still a damn big outlay for a low tier PC.
So, yeah, fuck Altman and every other dipshit pushing hopped up llms like they’re the second coming.
No no you mean Scam Fartman his alter ego.
I wish it was him alone, would be so much easier. This blame goes at least to all other big tech companies
I can still make fun of the guy for being a baby welfare queen bigger than Elon Musk.
At this stage, the price hike of the steam deck is probably more about making the price of the upcoming Steam Box and VR headset look like an easier pill to swallow, and not about actually needing to raise the price of the steam deck.
Could be both, but I think that both RAM and SSDs have gotten so expensive due to the AI bubble that even high volume manufacturers are having to raise prices by an unreasonable amount to stay profitable.
I definitely wouldn’t have gotten one if it was more than the $350 I paid. Although after I got one I would have considered paying more.
Noooo way would I pay $750+
I mean, it was also popular because it was relatively open in a field of closed handhelds. You could play, basically, whatever you wanted on it. Price was a factor as well… but it was never cheap. Just less expensive than other options.
I bought an ally x about a year and a half ago. At the time it commanded a substantial premium over the OLED deck, but it had the specs to back it up. Since then the price gap has closed and Asus has released another version of the Ally. Asus isn’t the only other handheld maker in town and you can install Bazzite or Steam OS on most of the deck alternatives. Unless you want an out of the box experience that doesn’t involve windows, I am not sure the price point for four year old hardware makes any sense.
For real. Doesn’t this just push people toward some of the cooler Lenovos, etc?
No.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3106428/lenovo-legion-go-prices-have-jumped-by-up-to-650-in-six-months.html
Thanks for the correction and especially the link.
I guess that’s on me for not checking in such a long time.
Yeah, this is effecting everything and everyone, not just one or two companies.
I could technically sell the parts of my computer today at a higher price than I bought them at because of all this bullshit.
Depends how long competitors can keep their prices in that range. I assume lenovo have some economy of scale in their favor, but I think they’ll eventually be priced up and out too.
Their prices have already been hiked up by way more than the SD
Nah. It’s all relative. If everything goes up accordingly, then steamdeck will remain a good buy.
Or nothing will be a good buy because people won’t be able to afford to get anything.
What about refurbished gaming computer and consoles?
Have you seen the prices of used memory and storage?
Prices of everything’s going up and up… guess what’s staying exactly the damn same?
Wages. Nah, dawg. We ain’t buying your shit if you don’t spread the wealth.
Don’t worry, trump controls the fed now. He’ll make sure the dollar becomes worthless, and everyone will be billionaires!
NO WAGE ONLY CONSUME
Time to consume the rich.
And somehow weed street prices
You can thank legal weed for that. Oregon weed prices have stayed pretty cool and low for a long while now. Helps that this stuff is pretty easy to grow.
Not much legal weed, were I’m from
Still the price stayed the same since now…nearly 25 years
With good connections or in bulk, it got even cheaper than before
Not sure how that works out with rising energy prices.
Maybe the switch to LEDs saved us here
Dealers know what’s up. Coke prices have also held steady for decades.
🙏 they keep the service industry running. Bless your local coke plug