Steam Deck OLED 1TB Becomes More Expensive Than A PS5 Pro After A $300 Price Hike

The hammer dropped on May 27, 2026. Valve has officialized on Steam Community the new prices of its Steam Deck OLED. The 512 GB model goes from $549 to $789, a hike of $240. The 1 TB model jumps from $649 to $949, $300 more. The eurozone also takes the hit with a 512 GB at €779 and a 1 TB at €919. The British market shifts to £649 and £779, while Australian and Polish versions face comparable hikes.

At $949, the Steam Deck OLED 1 TB is now more expensive than a PlayStation 5 Pro sold at $900 in the United States since April 2026. The positioning of the portable machine launched in 2022 as an affordable alternative to PC gaming is durably blurred. Valve justifies this decision by citing the rising memory and storage costs. The studio specifies that the Steam Deck itself hasn’t changed and that these new prices reflect the current state of component costs across the entire industry.

This price hike originates from a crisis that goes far beyond Valve. The global RAM shortage, nicknamed RAMageddon by observers, is caused by the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence data centers. These should absorb 70 % of the global memory chip production in 2026. The Steam Deck OLED embedding 16 GB of LPDDR5 plus an NVMe SSD, the machine is doubly affected. Apple has already confirmed delivery delays reaching 6 weeks on Mac Studio units equipped with 512 GB of unified memory. Framework raised the price of its Framework Desktop by $460 last January. Nintendo is also reportedly considering a hike on the Nintendo Switch 2.

For future buyers, several alternatives remain viable. Valve maintains its certified refurbished LCD models at around $400, half the price of a new OLED 512 GB. The refurbished OLED versions also remain available at reduced prices. The big concern now lies with the company’s upcoming products. The Steam Machine scheduled for the first half of 2026 has already seen its launch delayed. The Steam Frame VR announced for this year may strongly suffer from the same context. Sony says it wants to minimize the impact on the PS5 without ruling out a hike, and some analysts now push the PlayStation 6 back to 2029.