The Steam Deck has been dramatically lowered the price in Spring Sale
Except from some questionable online postings, the Steam Deck has never had even a brief price reduction in its entire existence. It all changes today, though, as the Steam Spring Sale kicks off with the first official Steam Deck discounts, a 10% price decrease across the board, in addition to the usual dealsplosion of discounted titles.
Also, the Steam Deck may not participate in another Steam sale for a very long time if not ever again after this one. In addition, Lawrence Yang, a designer at Valve, informed me that they are “looking at this as a one-time deal in honour of Steam Deck’s anniversary” after we interviewed him about the Deck’s first year in the wild. Thus, you’ll have until March 23 (the conclusion of the Spring Sale) to take advantage of the discounted price of the portable PC before it reverts to its regular price, maybe permanently.
There are a total of three Steam Deck editions on sale, and each one is discounted by 10%. There is a reduction across the board, with the 64GB model going from £349/$399 to £314/$359.10, the 256GB model going from £459/$529 to £413/$476.10, and the 512GB model going from £569/$649 to £512.10/$584.10. If you place an order, you won’t have to wait as long as in the depressing year of 2022, though I wouldn’t be shocked if it took the whole two weeks of Valve’s one-to-two week delivery estimate, what with the probable jump in demand.
Can you justify purchasing a Steam Deck at this price? I have no idea; it’s your cash. But, I have no problem reiterating that the Steam Deck was already excellent when it was first released, and that it has only become better thanks to a steady stream of software-based feature updates. It’s true that Valve has implemented a neat local game data sharing method, which can greatly expedite the installation process if you already have the game on another Machine.
Before you take Valve up on their offer, though, I’d like to point you in the direction of our top Steam Deck games guide and our compilation of the finest microSD cards for the Steam Deck. The latter is especially true because, while being a rather impressive hardware combination, none of the three games is included in the sale price. Like the Valve Index VR equipment being permanently packaged with Half-Life Alyx, I asked Yang whether Valve had considered attempting this.
He said, “It’s been discussed as you indicated, and as you mentioned we’ve done it in the past with other hardware. If there’s an opportunity to partner with a publisher to bundle a title that makes sense we’d definitely consider it.”
“That said, our userbase is so varied, and the types of titles people play on Deck is so diverse (see the top 20 list we post on Twitter every month, for example), it may be tricky to find the right title to bundle.”