alt Hacker NewsThe retirement of the Steam Deck LCD feels less like a reaction to skyrocketing RAM/NAND costs and more like a strategic simplification of Valve’s product lineup. While rising component prices make for a convenient financial excuse, the "secret motivation" is likely operational efficiency: managing two different screen types (LCD vs. OLED), batteries, and motherboards complicates the supply chain significantly.
By cutting the LCD, particularly the 256GB model, Valve avoids internal competition where their "budget" option cannibalizes sales of their premium OLED units, which offer a much better user experience.
furthermore, with whispers of new hardware like the "Steam Frame" or a revamped "Steam Machine," Valve needs to clear the stage. The LCD Deck served its purpose as a pioneer, but keeping it alive indefinitely dilutes the brand's focus.
For consumers, it’s a double-edged sword; we lose the most affordable entry point into PC handheld gaming, but we gain a clearer, more unified path forward. Ultimately, this move signals that Valve is confident the OLED is the new standard, and they are aggressively pivoting resources toward whatever comes next.
The china's supply chain will let it be, what about you?
When the news hit that the entry model was being retired I thought it might not be so bad because there’s probably a deluge of used models available, either because the owner doesn’t really use it or because they upgraded to the OLED. I was astounded by how many blatant scam postings there are on Facebook Marketplace. I can’t imagine that Meta can’t detect these since every post title ends in some random four character alphanumeric string. I’m concerned now that we’re going to see an uptick in people being scammed because they want a Steam Deck but can’t afford the OLED models.
I don’t have any data to support this, but I suspect a sizable segment of PC gamers aren’t going to view this as the impetus they needed to splurge on the OLED. I doubt very many of those people see this as a double-edged sword. It doesn’t particularly matter to them what Valve’s confidence in the product is if they can’t afford to buy one. While some may buy the step-up model, many won’t. Valve loses out on the sale of the hardware and on the sale of the software to run on it. And I’d be concerned that ceding the lower end of the market is going to poison the well like video game consoles in the early 80s.
With that said, Valve almost certainly has the data and would know better than me. It seems like a gamble to me. Maybe the post is correct and this is all about price anchoring for the new Steam Machine and Frame.