As much as I really rate my Nintendo Switch, for me the king or queen of the best gaming handhelds has to be the Steam Deck. It's beautifully built, it has access to a huge variety of games from exceptional Indies to the biggest blockbusters and I've lost entire evenings to its many joys. The only thing I don't like is the price. So it's nice to see that Valve has finally cut the cost of the Steam Deck everywhere it sells it.
The price cut is a decent 10% off, so in the US that means the price is just shy of $360 / $477 / $585 for the 64, 256 and 512GB models respectively. In the UK it's £314 / £413 / £512.
If you've been hanging on for a decent Steam Deck deal, this is it. And here's a knowingly cheesy video about it.
Which Steam Deck should you buy?
They're all great, but when I was spending my own money I went for the mid-range 256GB model. I'm not a huge Steam gamer – I tend to play the same handful of games to death – so I didn't feel the need to shell out for the biggest storage, but the 64GB one looked a little too limited to me. It also has the slowest storage of the three, with eMMC storage instead of the NVMe SSDs of its two bigger siblings.
The Steam Deck launch wasn't as smooth as it could have been, but the teething troubles are long gone and it's a very solid handheld with over 8,000 verified games to play.
If you're wondering whether this discounting is to clear stock in anticipation of a new and much more powerful model, I think that's possible but highly unlikely. Valve recently said it had no intention of massively updating the handheld with a massively more powerful processor; the guts of the hardware, as far as Valve is concerned, are pretty much ideal already. That doesn't mean a Steam Deck 2 won't have improvements in other areas, much like the Switch OLED improved on the Switch with a better display. But the current Steam Deck is a safe buy in terms of future-proof gaming.
If you want to take advantage of the discounting you'll need to do it fairly soon. The prices go back to normal after 23 March.
