Article discusses the effect of rising hardware prices on the deck.
Some highlights:
How much worse has the pricing situation gotten for Valve since November? Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost van Dreunen suggested that the 512GB Steam Machine model would probably run $50 to $75 more than he expected when the Steam Machine was announced, and to expect a price “potentially $100+ above target” for the high-end 2TB model. That would mean a $599 to $629 price at the low-end and $849 to $899 for the high-end model, in his estimation.
Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter agreed that, even with the additional component costs, Valve would likely “try to get it out at $599 or so for the 512GB version,” A starting price higher than that would mean “abysmal” sales, he added. “I think $700 is a death sentence and $1,000 is unsellable.”
I’d recommend reading the article though, it has a lot more of value than just those quotes. It goes on to talk about how the price increases will likely hurt valve more than traditional console makers, and how these increases will affect sales.
The steam deck is nice, but you have to throttle a lot of games performance. And that’s on an already very small screen. I have played the crap out of my steam deck, but there are some games that just don’t work super well. The difference is just the power of the components, primarily CPU and GPU, but also RAM and SSD speeds. It would expect the mini gaming PC to be more expensive than the handheld, if the expectation is that you can play any large AAA game at (basically) full specs with good frame rate. You can’t do that for cheap. I also don’t expect the price point to be a problem