As of February 24th, being able to get a Steam Deck of the official website is currently no longer available, with all current models being marked as ‘ Out of Stock ‘.

Located on the Steam Deck store page, Valve has now announcing that the Steam Deck OLED, and potentially other models, “ could possibly be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortage. “ (Steam , Feb, 24 – 26, 26 ).

The cause of this delay had seemingly been caused due to an uproar in AI-driven hardware becoming more prominent within the PC industry, including the gaming industry well.

Due to the huge demand for AI accelerators, its caused a huge rise in DRAM and SSD prices, those being the primary components within the Steam Deck.

As mentioned in GameSpace’s article on the matter, RAM manufacturers had previously cut production when prices dropped but because of the recent AI spike, it’s caused Valve to come across issues optaining RAM for their console (GameSpace , Feb, 24, 26 ).

Initially on February 4th, Valve, within their blog post on Steam, had written about certain components for the Steam Machine — a console-like desktop also being produced by Valve — had fallen victim to rising computer component prices, leading to it unfortunately getting delayed (Steam , Feb, 4 26 ).

However, this has ultimately spread to Steam Decks due to the prices going up for vital components that were needed for it as well.

These shortages have fueled third-party markups, causing huge price spikes in Steam Decks.

With the official online store being out of stock, marketplaces listing Steam Deck OLED units have raised to over $1,000, a huge difference diverge from Valve’s $549 MSRP for their 512 GB model and 1 TB variant.

If the RAM and memory shortages worsen, Valve might have to raise prices or cut back on production, which could increase pressure from the gray market as of now.