Steam Deck Faces Growing Competition From ARM Handhelds

It's harder to say where the Steam Deck will stand in the handheld market long-term because of its current price, hardware competition, memory costs, and the rise of ARM-based handhelds. The device still lets you play PC games, emulate PCs, and use community-made software, but what it offers has changed since it launched.

The Steam Deck has been on my mind ever since I made that small Steam Deck 2 news video. And I’ve really just been thinking about the sustained viability of the Steam Deck because, at present, the Steam Deck is unfortunately priced, to say the least, at darn near $1,000 for a 1TB OLED and like almost $800 or $900 for the half-TB OLED.

Steam Deck Pricing Has Changed Its Position

It just really isn’t priced appropriately, to say the least, and it really has severely affected my willingness to recommend it to pretty much anybody. There are cheaper native SteamOS devices than the Steam Deck is right now, which is crazy. Steam Deck, in and of itself, should probably be one of the cheapest things by now.

By the time the Xbox Series X and S and PS5 were coming out, you could pick up an original PS4 or DVR-style Xbox One for dirt cheap, with games and controllers. I say all that to get to the point that the Steam Deck should have been, and could have been, in a much better spot now than it is. And that’s predominantly due to an obscene amount of outside factors.

When the Steam Deck initially launched, it suffered low-to-intermediate stock issues because of the chip shortage. Then we had a brief window where things were pretty okay. But then inflation happened, and it still is happening, and a lot of people simply couldn’t afford it just due to everything else around it costing a lot more money.

The Steam Deck Could Have Reached a Lower Price

If things like the Steam Deck, the Xboxes, and the PlayStations followed the previously established natural order of product life cycles, the Steam Deck could easily be around $300 by now, or at least maintain its $400 price point. Maybe we wouldn’t have to say goodbye to some of those cheaper, lower-end SKUs if it wasn’t so darn expensive to build and just shred these companies' margins.

I am concerned that, going into 2027, the Steam Deck will still not be great. Steam Deck's biggest selling point was that it was the cheapest. And when you’re not the cheapest, you are less than $100 away from an Xbox Ally X, and you don’t even get half the performance; I'd argue you’re in pretty rough shape.

But the Steam Deck is uniquely positioned as a device that doesn’t inherently need to be the fastest. It is a device that is more designed for the back catalog, designed around community-building tools around it, enabling you to do more than just PC games, but enabling you to play all of your games.

And I do think that’s probably going to be the biggest competition for the Steam Deck for the many years to come because of the ever-growing popularity of Android-based handhelds and the even less overhead that ARM and just Android-based gaming tends to have in comparison to even Linux, which already has a pretty low ceiling when we really think about it.

The most lethal blow to the Steam Deck's future will be the rise of the ARM-based handheld.

Nothing is as bloated as Windows, and Linux is even better. You get all the optimization you can get. Background tasks are almost eliminated. You can dedicate all your power to gaming and not dealing with a bunch of nonsense. And Android is very much, in my opinion, the same. It comes with all the same benefits.

Development will only get better with time, and it’s only a matter of time before you’re not just meeting but exceeding what the Steam Deck can do. And I think that’s when the Steam Deck is going to certainly, at least for me, lose a lot of appeal, because once you really take away the ability to play both your favorite retro games and some of your favorite PC games.