Valve says the memory crisis hasn't changed its Steam Deck 2 plans. The euro price tags say otherwise

If you've priced Valve hardware in euros lately, "not really affected" is a hard sentence to swallow. That's how Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais answered IGN when asked whether the ongoing memory and storage crunch has changed the company's plans for a Steam Deck successor. The plan, he says, is the same one Valve has repeated for years: no new Deck until it can deliver a clearly noticeable jump in performance. What he left open is the part that matters to anyone actually buying one - he framed it as a question of how and when they can deliver that under current conditions.

Here's the context that sentence sits in. In spring, Valve raised Steam Deck OLED prices across Europe: the 512 GB model went from 569 to 779 euros, the 1 TB from 679 to 919. That's an extra 210 to 240 euros for hardware that hadn't changed by a single transistor - Valve pointed straight at component costs. And this week the Steam Frame, its standalone VR headset, opened reservations at 1,049 euros for 256 GB and 1,279 euros for 1 TB, later and pricier than Valve had originally led people to expect.

What "unchanged plans" actually means for us

I read Griffais' answer as two separate statements. The engineering target is unchanged: Valve won't ship a Deck 2 that's only a bit faster. Fine, that's the right call - a handheld that's 20 percent quicker for 300 euros more is nobody's dream. But the second half, the how and when, is where the crisis lives. Nothing in it rules out a later launch, or a launch price that has nothing to do with the 419 euros the first Deck cost when it arrived in Europe.

For players in our region the math is blunt. RAM and storage are exactly the parts a handheld can't skimp on - the Deck already shares 16 GB between CPU and GPU - and they're the parts whose prices have exploded. The Frame is the first Valve device to reach the market after that hit, and it came out above a thousand euros. A Deck 2 built in the same climate isn't going to be the affordable-PC-in-your-bag story the first one was, unless the market cools before it ships.

Practical advice for now: if you want a Deck at all, the used market is where the sane prices are. From what I see on the classifieds, the spring hike nudged second-hand asking prices up too, but a well-kept LCD or OLED Deck is still a better buy than waiting for a successor with no date and no price. And the Frame lottery closes Thursday 17 September at 17:00 UTC. Valve ships directly to the EU, though check that your country actually appears at checkout before you get excited. Winners get 72 hours to pay. At 1,049 euros with no power supply in the box, I'd want to be very sure I have a PC that can feed it.

The "not really" isn't spin - I believe Valve when it says the spec target hasn't moved. It's just that the sticker has already moved twice this year, and that's the number we live with.

Image: FritzchensFritz / CC0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AMD@7nmTSMC@DAPU_VanGogh@Zen2_RDNA2@Valve_Steamdeck_LCD@100-000000405_2242SSY_9KP1485V20241_DSCx03@makro.jpg