Valve is celebrating the first year of official availability for the Steam Deck with the hardware’s first-ever official sale. Those looking to buy Valve’s portable hardware can get a unit for 10 percent off until March 23 as part of Steam’s regular spring software sale.
In the US, that translates to the following price reductions for the various Steam Deck configurations:
- 64GB eMMC:
$399.00down to $359.10 - 256GB NVMe:
$529.00down to $476.10 - 512GB NVMe:
$649.00down to $584.10
Even a temporary price drop would have been hard to picture for the Steam Deck just a few months ago, when the hardware was still enjoying a months-long run atop Steam’s top-sellers list and Valve was still struggling to fulfill launch-day preorders in a timely manner. But Steam Deck units have been available without a preorder since October and are now set to be delivered one to two weeks after an order is placed.
While this could just be a sign of improvements in longstanding hardware supply chain issues, the Steam Deck hardware has also dropped a bit on Steam’s own sales charts in recent weeks. And you can contrast the Steam Deck’s sale price with the Nintendo Switch, which has yet to see an official price drop in its six-year history (though retailer-specific Black Friday-style deals have thrown in bundled games and Switch Online subscriptions for the standard MSRP).
If you’re worried about investing in the first Steam Deck right before the launch of a souped-up version 2, fret not. Valve has recently suggested that a more powerful follow-up to the Steam Deck is “a few years” away (though a more surface-level cosmetic refresh could conceivably come sooner).
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1924853