We thought it couldn't get worse.

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]We are quite royally screwed here. So, Valve just raised the price of both Steam Deck models by over 40%. 43% for one, 46% for the other, also known as a lot, with the 512 GB model going up from $549 to $789. And this is everywhere. This isn't just the US. The 1 TBTE model went up from $649 to 9.49. And this price increase is a lot higher than what we've seen from other console manufacturers.

[00:00:32]If you want to consider Valve one of those, Nintendo is set to increase the price of the Switch 2, something that it warned of in advance. PlayStation already increased the price of the PS5 multiple times. And by the way, it's pretty safe to say that there will be more price increases. We'll get into that. And they're even affecting other stuff. The Lenovo Legion Go, which used to be a very expensive piece of hardware, but in my opinion, definitely worth its price if you were looking for the best, also increased its price dramatically with it going from $1,350 for the upgraded skew to 2,000 and the high tier one going from 1,500 to 3,000, making it so the Rag Ally is currently the only handheld PC that isn't suffering from price increases.

[00:01:19]And even smaller devices like the Ion Neo Thor, sorry, I'm just replaying the Bayonetta games, are seeing either hardware decreases for the same price or price increases for the same hardware. I mentioned this to illustrate the fact that it is global. It is getting worse and it probably will continue to do so for a while despite the fact that many companies are now pulling out of the AI game because it's not worth it and because it's never made financial sense.

[00:01:48]But it is indeed AI and how much that has been consuming the resources necessary to build these machines that is now slowly suffocating the gaming market. And this comes with a list of different consequences. Some regarding the next generation of games, some regarding the current generation of games. Most of them affecting us as customers and the quality of the things that we're going to get. and some of them even shifting the market so much that I can now kind of recommend the Switch 2, which I definitely wasn't expecting to say, but that's kind of where we are. There's a lot to dig into with these price increases, specifically how it directly affects competition when it comes to Steam Deck and the Steam Machine. And I would like you to be informed and also later on I'll be giving you my opinion on what you should do if you're worried about these price increases. What I can tell you is that a lot of this is very bad. It's bad for competition. It's bad for the future of the industry. And while there are some silver linings, I think being informed is really important. So, by the way, hi, I'm Mug. And if you're new here, welcome. And if you're not new here, welcome back. It's great to see you. I was going to say that you're looking fantastic, that you're looking like a,000 bucks, but now I might as well say that you're looking like a 1 TBTE Steam Deck OLED. You know the drill. If you like the video, hit the like button.

[00:03:03]Helps it spread throughout the algorithm, reach more people. And if you really like what I do, consider subscribing. just make sure that I earn that subscription, be it during this video or by checking out the channel and some other stuff. Remember that your subscription is very valuable and therefore should be earned. There's a lot to dig into and there will be chapters down below for everything available. All right, let's get into it.

[00:03:24]So, what has become increasingly clear is that the era of hardware going down in price as a generation continues, of us getting value bundles with a bunch of different games included, or even revisions of a console coming out for cheaper than the original one with upgraded specs. That is a dream gone by.

[00:03:44]We have now fully entered the world where console prices are going to increase over the lifespan of a generation. And here's the kicker. Even if in the future the AI bubble bursts and we don't have the problem with resources to produce them, this is something that the video game industry will not give up. Even if in the future they have the means to lower the price of a console, it will be their last desperation move if they ever do it.

[00:04:12]because now they know that they can get away with increasing the price which benefits them greatly. Especially in the case of releasing new hardware where they are now conditioning us as customers to run out and get things as soon as they release because that is now the best value proposal for us. It's when we will get it the cheapest and get to enjoy that console for the longest which coincidentally is just fantastic for their stock price. This is the new standard they want to implement. And I honestly can't really come up with a way of fighting back because we can no longer really go outside, look for alternatives, and punish the big players in the space because those alternatives are suffering the same fate, if not worse. Now, I'm sure somebody out there is going to say that this is an orchestrated play by everybody in the gaming space, but that to me sounds uh quite far-fetched. Instead, it just feels to me like this is where we are and we'll have to make do with what we have, at least for now. I'm also aware that a lot of people are saying that Valve are greedy and terrible for raising the price of the Steam Deck. And look, if you want to complain, please do because that does indeed help. Making noise matters. But the truth is that it's more complicated for Valve than it is for platform holders. And we'll look a bit into that later because they don't have a Game Pass, Nintendo Switch Online, or PS+ to sell you. They don't see as much benefit or need in the hardware market compared to the platform holders, which is why their price increases are very similar to other third-party things, including just the PC market. And I don't want this video to be some outrage piece where I'm just farming the clicks off of, "Oh my god, the price went up." No, my goal here is to really analyze what this means for the overall market and for the future of the games industry and how that's going to affect us as customers. But that leads me to the first big takeaway about all of this, which is competition is a problem right now. Now, I don't think it's a secret that I have a pretty big problem with PlayStation this generation. And I'm sure some people think that it's because I dislike PlayStation. I do not. I criticize because I care and I want things to be better, especially from the perspective of customers. And in my opinion, PlayStation has been needing competition because they've gotten way too comfortable making live service games and not actually giving value to its customers, aside from it being a console that plays other games. And I was really excited for the new developments in gaming to bring them competition.

[00:06:48]increasingly, as I've mentioned before, the next generation or the rolling generations, whatever we want to call them now, was shaping up to be Nintendo on their island that they're usually on.

[00:06:58]PlayStation on one hand being the dominant console and their direct competition being PC devices in general.

[00:07:07]Linux-based stuff, which is good for the entire PC ecosystem with the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine, and other devices.

[00:07:14]Windows-based devices like the upcoming Project Helix, the new console by Xbox, as well as stuff like the Rag Ally or the Lenovo Legion, which you can get the Legion in both the Linux version and the Windows version and also Android devices as Proton and Linux and all that keeps developing. And all of those grouped together as one was a very powerful way of bringing competition to PlayStation and forcing the market to move. And that's the important thing about competition. If there is nobody willing to fight for your wallet to give you something better than their adversary, things stagnate. And ultimately, the people who suffer are the customer. And because of these price shakeups, PlayStation is going to be sitting comfortably and even looking good. Valve has made it clear that the Steam Machine will not be sold at a loss for them. And if these are the prices that we have on the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine is not going to be cheap and it's not going to be a direct competitor to the existing consoles. It also means that Xbox's next project, the next gen, could potentially be incredibly expensive, especially if they do not want to eat costs on something that is essentially a PC.

[00:08:29]There's a ton of risks with that, by the way, of just people buying them as PCs, not even for the console part of it. And now PlayStation, as long as they are either the last one to raise the prices or the ones that raise the prices the least, still look like the golden boys, meaning that they can continue to not really care about making good games and continue to fund live service projects that they cancel. But they will continue to dominate because they have the most popular console platform and they get a huge revenue cut of everything that goes through PlayStation Network, including their recently revealed numbers of stuff like 15 million weekly average users on Fortnite. The unfortunate truth of this is that if you want to play games on a console, on your couch, if that's how you enjoy games, the PlayStation 5, even though we shouldn't be rewarding a lot of the behavior that comes from PlayStation, is now going to be the best option for that. And these prices even make what was originally just a stupidly ludicrous price for the PS5 Pro look appealing. I don't say that happily.

[00:09:37]This is a nightmare scenario. Similarly to how PlayStation is now winning by doing the least, the entire perspective on the Switch 2 has completely changed.

[00:09:49]A little bit of behind the scenes info that I think is really funny here. I intended this last week on the channel to be Nintendo week. I wanted to publish this big essay I've been working on about racing games and Mario Kart World if I had the time. Although some things popped up, I wanted to review the new Yoshi game. But the centerpiece was a video that I had titled, "What is the point of the Switch 2?" And the thesis of that video was pretty simple. To me, when the Switch came out, it hit a sweet spot that no other device could hit. It had the right price. It was a portable device, and it was also very capable at playing a long list of games of all sorts at home in a console-like experience with either few setbacks or in the case of indie games, none at all.

[00:10:35]The fact that when the Switch came out, there was no real competition for what the Switch offered meant that it was the dominant device of that generation.

[00:10:44]Sure, the PS4 was in however many households, but let's be honest, the Switch did incredibly well. However, by the time we reached the Switch 2, that market has considerably changed, which is what led me to my initial review of the Switch 2 being, yeah, I don't I don't recommend this. The things that used to be unique about the Switch were all gone by the time the Switch 2 came out. If you were looking for a device that allowed you to play portably and also play at home, there were a ton of better options, especially when taking into account the price. You could get a Steam Deck and get access to a ton of other games on Steam for much lower prices. If you cared more about the overall performance and console experience of things, it was better to get a PS5 or an Xbox or shell out for a PC because you'd be able to play games that run better and look better. And even just in its design as a portable device, in my opinion, the Switch 2 is just a tad bit too big at times and definitely doesn't fit the same vibe as the original Switch as something that neither in its price or its design I would hand over to kids. When you couple that with stuff like not having a Hall effect joysticks, meaning that joystick drift is always a concern, the fact that the screen isn't good in general, it's not just that it's not OLED, it's that it's not even a good LCD display. The value proposal of the Switch meant that it only to me satisfied a very small group of people because it also didn't satisfy people who wanted Nintendo exclusives because at launch those weren't there. They're also not fully there yet, but everything around the Switch 2 has changed considerably. And by Nintendo doing nothing except raising the price, but only a bit, at least compared to the other things we're seeing. The Switch 2 has gone from a console that its main value proposal was eventually it will have Nintendo exclusives to an actually competitive console if you wanted a hybrid portable.

[00:12:46]If you're looking for a machine that can play a ton of the same indies that you would be playing from Steam, some AAA games, even if they are a bit lower, similarly to how they would play lower on other devices that are portable, it has those things, but it's now at a much more compelling price point than its competition. So, yes, Nintendo wins by doing nothing. It's a prophecy, and it it's it's it bothers me. But now the Switch 2 actually has a place in the market, a place that is valuable. And that while before I felt like it was only meant for Nintendo fans, people that were really in that ecosystem and investing in the future of exclusives, now I think that it has genuine merit on its own because the competition around it has gone absolutely bananas. And the kicker is that very similarly to how the PlayStation 5 will now continue to look good. If the market continues this trend, which I mean, let's be honest, that's that's what it's looking like.

[00:13:45]Even if the PS5 raises its prices, it will look good. The Switch 2 will continue to look good. Even if it raises its prices as long as the jumps come staggered and are not as big as the other hardware manufacturers. And we are getting to the silver linings of this. I do not make videos that are purely doom and gloom because I I refuse to view the world that way. Although admittedly, this is very bad. The the general situation right now is very bad. But it's not all bad. There's a couple of things that could happen here. A high probability that a combination of them ends up happening. And some of them are pretty good. Some of them are good, but eventually and in the short term very bad. I think one of the potential ways that this plays out, especially looking towards a next generation, which might be delayed, probably will be, is that prices of gaming in general as a hobby.

[00:14:42]what we have seen from hardware to games themselves upping the price with one excuse or another with inflation with AI with whatever you want to consider the end result is going to be that the prices are just not acceptable and a lot of people are going to be pushed out of the hobby now you can never really get fully pushed out of gaming because now it's a very mature medium and if you want to play games you're always going to have access to fantastic devices for emulation. You're always going to be able to play games that aren't very hardware dependent, even if they're not the latest thing, and you will have great experiences across indies and the marvelous, unfathomably huge backlog of games that exist from all the previous generations. The amount of wonders that exist in the gaming world that many of us have yet to unearth are there. And if we can't turn to the nicest, latest shiny new thing, that won't stop people who want to game from gaming. But it will put a damper on the current growth of gaming, the market, and how it all plays out from budgets assigned to games to the prices that those games are sold at. Basically, a complete toptobottom shift. However, if those consoles don't sell and the market stagnates because gaming becomes even more of a luxury than it already is, we will see new competitors rise up and we will see ways that the industry has to change in order to appeal to people who crave gaming, who crave new stuff but can't afford what used to be affordable. The other very positive silver lining in all of this has nothing to do with hardware and the manufacturers, but instead with the software side, with people making games, and that is that if we're going to see this generation continue to stretch out and potentially the expectations for the next generation to be consoles that don't sell as well, even though not officially this generation that we're in will stretch out more because a majority of the customer base is on the previous generation, hardware, meaning that the general trend for the future might be that yes, consoles and hardware get ridiculously expensive. So, buying in is a nightmare, but we need to compensate somewhere else, including potentially video game prices being more competitive and lowering in order to sell more than they currently do. But especially in the case of stuff like optimizing games and refocusing games from ray tracing and path tracing and maximizing the realism and the graphical effects and going back to making really good games. In a way appealing to the same people that would be happy playing their backlogs by giving them games that compete with the design philosophies and just the raw gameplay of those backlogs but release today. because those games could then sell on every device. And we would be looking towards getting the maximum out of what we have currently and making this hardware last through the AI bubble and even a potential video game industry crash in general because the people making games still want to make them and still want to sell them. And the existing user base is there. So, they're going to have to compete to make the best games possible in a new market where wallets are stretched way too thin. But there is still demand for new and cool games. To me, that is seeming increasingly likely potentially even looking towards the era of optimization wars. making sure that games work on a Steam Deck OLED. Making sure that they work on a Switch 2 or on lower-end hardware. Making it so that games look better and better on a base PS5 because the industry for so long has now been obsessed with just taking advantage of the next hardware step that we have deprioritized making the most of the current hardware step. If I show you, which I I'm hopefully doing right now, a game from the launch or the first year of the PS2 versus a game from the tail end of the PS2, they are night and day.

[00:18:59]There is almost a generational looking jump in graphics fidelity and performance between the start of a generation and the end of it. And that hasn't happened in a while. Why hasn't it happened? Well, it isn't because the new hardware doesn't allow for people to get more juice out of the squeeze. It's that instead there's been no need to.

[00:19:21]There's a lot of factors here from games homogenizing into Unreal Engine 5 and games kind of offloading the optimization work onto stuff like frame generation. But the point is that when the market starts to squeeze on you, this might be the way out for games to compete for your wallet while hardware goes bananas. And that to me would be great because it's a lost art that we shouldn't forget. We should have people trying to make the best and greatest looking games if you really care about how they look on current generation hardware. Trying to do Blackmagic with what is in the box instead of waiting for the next box. That would be a win for customers. Especially if our next line of defense with this whole situation is holding out and waiting to see what happens post AI bubble or post crash which is looking like what is going to happen. And I would recommend that you sit tight, you enjoy what you have and try and not worry about this chaos by knowing that it's coming. So, what do I recommend you do if, for example, you're on a PlayStation 4 or a Switch One or some relatively outdated PC hardware at the moment and you're worried that in the coming years you're going to be screwed over. Well, my personal prediction based on a lot of stuff. I have a I have a whole YouTube channel of me analyzing things basically is that over the coming years, we will slowly see price increases until there is an inevitable crash. After that crash, we might see the next generation be prohibitively expensive or fix itself. And if you want to bet on the fixing itself part, go ahead. Just know that it's a slim chance with a lot of previous conditions needing to be fulfilled. If you're worried about today in the immediiacy of what you should do, I can now recommend getting a PS5 if you just want to have access to the current generation of games. If you have a bit more cash, I always recommend PC above everything else. But that's because I like PC. I like the flexibility it gives me. I like emulation. I like my PC ecosystem and being able to SteamCloud a bunch of different games and play them on different devices. And of course, PC is also where I do all of the work for the channel, including recording and editing and stuff. So, I'm obviously biased towards the platform.

[00:21:48]Surprisingly, I can recommend the Switch 2 if you want that portable hybrid experience. It is now way more compelling than it was when the Steam Deck and other platforms were the competition for it and in the same price performance outdoing it very often range, except for Switch having the exclusives as the ace up their sleeve.

[00:22:12]now they're actually competitive and if the prices are going to increase, I think that if you come from a Switch One and you were thinking about the Switch 2 or maybe contemplating if you should move to a Steam Deck, that decisions kind of been made. And in my opinion, if you wait, the price will increase. It will go up before it goes down. Things will get worse before they get better.

[00:22:35]What happens after that? Will the dust settle? And will we see players like PlayStation be punished for their first party output? Will we see the new kind of coalition of Steam, Linux, Windows devices that are all very PCbased, all have access to Steam, to Game Pass compete and bring in a new sort of competitor into the space of all of PC together hopefully. But as you can see, PCs are just as screwed over by the prices of hardware as consoles. It's just that consoles currently can take the brunt of that a bit better than a Valve can. Mostly because Valve doesn't need to sell you their own console. If you're on PC, you are giving them money by buying stuff on Steam. where PS5 does need to sell PS5s to get their revenue cut of all of the sales of things that are definitely not PlayStation games. I feel like Daniel Amod really highlight it well on Twitter when he said that the situation for Valve is a lot tougher than it is for the other companies mostly because Valve can't subsidize hardware because they're not generating more value from that hardware. There are tons of PC devices and they don't sell subscriptions and things like that. So in my opinion, even though this is a disaster situation, those are the steps to take. That is what you should do to protect yourself, to futureproof yourself. But you shouldn't worry too much because the market is going to have to correct down to a lowest common denominator, which is probably going to be the current generation we're in. and the power that that is at. Things will have to be optimized more for the PS5 and for the Switch 2 and for current PC hardware specs because you can't bet on making things that will only work for the people who buy the next super prohibitively expensive thing that might crash it all or the crash will come before and those next generation things will have to come in at affordable prices again. Or I could be totally wrong. I'm not immune to being wrong. I can be wrong, but I'm pretty confident in a lot of what I'm saying. But of course, I'll be monitoring this situation carefully because if something affects the ability of people to enjoy their free time, to enjoy their lives, and to have fun with their hobbies, and enjoy the world of gaming, if it harms customers, it is 100% something that I am paying extra attention to. But hopefully you've come out of this video a bit more informed about how these prices and these changes, how the world of video games morphing and transforming into something else will affect you and what you should be or shouldn't be worried about. And remember, knowledge is power, especially when it comes to defending us, the customers best interests. In the meantime, I've been Mug and thank you so very much for watching through this video and hopefully it has been useful to you. I want to give an extra special shout out to the members of the wall, be they patrons over on Patreon or members directly here on YouTube. These are the people that support everything I do on the channel come hell or high water.

[00:25:54]That doesn't diminish how much I appreciate you for watching this through. And if you like the video, like the video. It always helps.

[00:26:02]Maybe now I've earned your subscription if you want to be here for everything from news, reviews, essays, and retrospectives. Maybe hit that subscribe button or check out the channel. There's some good videos on there. I I I'm biased, but I I like them. For now, please remember to just play video games, have fun. Doesn't matter the device, the platform. just enjoy what video games have to offer and worry less about the breaking news when we don't know fully where that might be headed.

[00:26:32]There's a bunch of great games still to come this year, some that are incredibly exciting and we will weather out the storm because that's just what we do.

[00:26:42]They can't stop us from enjoying our video games. That simple. And as always, I'll see you again very soon.