You can afford to pay more for this like this when you live with your parents and have no plans on moving out

Same here, I bought a play station 4, and it was collecting dust. I couldn't find the energy to play, when I had time, I just opted to lie down and rest.

Is this old age? 🫪

I went with the Lenovo legion go for the switch-like removable controllers. It's running CachyOS and I use it more as a mini computer than a gaming device. Same, gaming just doesn't do as much for me as it used to

My best friend does landscape design and her clients are in the rich neighborhoods. The rich have plenty of money and in return makes her plenty of money.

The people with money still have plenty of disposable income.

Then there are plenty of people without that financial security that make poor decisions. The people that are actually struggling like myself aren't the ones purchasing this.

It's the furrys

There are plenty of people in the world who can buy these things without it affecting their financial stability. The US has 20+ million millionaires. Around half if you remove their primary residence. These people won’t blink an eye by this price increase.

As we have seen, they won't and never will. This is arguing for gravity to stop pulling so hard.

The mechanism to fix the problem you're describing has broken long ago and everyone stopped trying to fix it. Your money needs more choices of where to be spent, then businesses will force each other to price things reasonably. If anyone can name all the companies that make a type of product, then that is not enough companies.

So the prices never go back down.

So, the bottleneck here is really the memory prices, and while Steam Deck sales do affect memory prices

as with anyone buying anything with memory

my guess is that it's a pretty small factor relative to other devices using memory.

According to WP, the Steam Deck has 16GB and sold uh, 4 million units over its entire lifetime as of February this year. It's been out for four years. So figure ~64 petabytes of DRAM over its lifetime, or ~16 petabytes of DRAM per year.

For comparison, in a single year, looking at smartphones:

https://wifihifi.com/1-25b-smartphone-units-produced-in-2025-apple-samsung-tied-for-tops/

1.25B Smartphone Units Produced in 2025, Apple & Samsung Tied for Tops

https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/Global-Smartphone-Average-DRAM-Hits-Record-8.4GB-in-2025

Global Smartphone Average DRAM Hits Record 8.4GB in 2025

8.4 GB is the per-phone average, including older phones, so this is probably a conservative estimate, but assume for 2025, that meant that phone manufacture consumed ~10,500 petabytes of DRAM in a single year.

EDIT: And I'm sure that AI consumers dwarf that, given announcements about how much OpenAI alone was buying 40% of global capacity.

EDIT2: And if one wants local LLMs

I'd like to run my LLMs locally, not have some cloud provider do it

and you assume maybe 1% capacity utilization, then we're going to need something like 100 times what the cloud AI companies are getting in RAM to get to that point.

So, yeah, Steam Deck purchasers do count towards demand for memory, but...I don't think that they likely move the needle all that much alone.

a steal if you consider tomorrow's prices

Don't worry, for just 50 dollars a month you can subscribe to the basic peasant tier version of GeForce NOW that entitles you to a whopping 4 hours of game play per month, as long as its played between the hours of 3am and 4am local time.

It's definitely getting worse, but I feel like it won't get that bad. I don't think that the unaffordabiltiy of PC components will result in gaming becoming a niche commodity, I think it will result in people either not being able to play certain games, or not play them at the settings they want. I think gaming will persist via things like cheaper or used hardware. I think also some game developers will adjust the performance requirements of their games so that it meets (or attempts to meet) the reality of what people are able to buy. Triple A gaming might die tho if they don't adapt.

Thats has hardware thats 4+ years out of date, and was already long since showing its age with running newer released stuff.

Its a neat device, but its.. at this point.. an old neat device.

I use it mainly as a home media pc. I got it as a gift though.

There's countless good games that work on older equipment. You could play for the rest of your life on just that slightly older stuff and not get through half of it.