Despite the significant price increase, the Steam Deck is already sold out in certain regions

You've no doubt by now seen the rather surprising increase in the price of the Steam Deck OLED, but that doesn't seem to have stopped people buying them all up.

Looking at availability across multiple regions - the official Steam Deck store is showing both models of the Steam Deck OLED sold out in the USA and Canada. However, checking further - both models appear to still be in stock in the UK, Poland and France but that could change. All of this has pushed the Steam Deck once again into the #1 spot on Valve's Global Top Seller list (although that is by revenue).

Valve do note on the store page "Steam Deck OLED may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages" - so we may see stock intermittently appear. We also have no idea how much stock Valve actually had, but they were confident enough to announce stock was back with the new prices and for some it's now just gone already. Ouch.

Safe to say though - the Steam Deck is no longer the ideal choice when it comes to handheld gaming. As much as that sucks for everyone. The Legion Go S with SteamOS might now actually be the better option. It's a bit more than the 1TB OLED in the UK, but it does have the Z1 Extreme and more RAM. Or, even the ROG XBOX ALLY X that has the newer Z2 Extreme. The prices between all of them are a lot closer now, and so with the more powerful chips in the other handhelds the Steam Deck is a hard sell now. Still, back to the title of the article - it clearly hasn't stopped people buying them from Valve.

Perhaps though with the new handhelds coming with the just announced Intel Arc G-Series processors, we might get at least a little more competition going again.

Thanks again to all the AI companies and their vast data centres sucking up all the components and forcing prices up everywhere.