Credit: Valve

Earlier this month, Valve announced it was delaying the release of its new Steam Machine desktop and Steam Frame VR headset due to memory and storage shortages that have been cascading across the PC industry since late 2025. But those shortages are also coming for products that have already launched.

Valve had added a note to its Steam Deck page noting that the device would be “out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.” None of Valve’s three listed Steam Deck configurations are currently available to buy, nor are any of the certified refurbished Steam Deck configurations that Valve sometimes offers.

Valve hasn’t announced any price increases for the Deck, at least not yet—the 512GB OLED model is still listed at $549 and the 1TB version at $649. But the basic 256GB LCD model has been formally discontinued now that it has sold out, increasing the Deck’s de facto starting price from $399 to $549. Valve announced in December that it was ending production on the LCD version of the Deck and that it wouldn’t be restocked once it sold out.

The Steam Deck’s hardware is four years old this month, and faster hardware with better chips and higher-resolution screens have been released in the years since. But those Ryzen Z1 and Z2 chips aren’t always dramatically faster than the Deck’s semi-custom AMD chip; many of those handhelds are also considerably more expensive than the OLED Deck’s $549 starting price. When it’s in stock, the Deck still offers compelling performance and specs for the price.

Shortages of RAM and flash memory chips—caused mostly by the AI industry’s staggering demand for those components and widely expected to last through 2026 and beyond—have come at an especially bad time for Valve. The Steam Deck has helped make a small dent in Windows’ dominance on gaming PCs thanks to the Proton translation technology that allows unmodified Windows games to run on the Linux-based SteamOS. The company’s efforts to build on that success with the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame were paused by memory and storage shortages, and now people who want to buy a Steam Deck may end up turning to an alternative Windows-based handheld instead.

If you want a handheld that runs SteamOS, Lenovo’s Legion Go S is the one third-party handheld that ships with the operating system these days. But adventurous buyers can try SteamOS on any AMD-based handheld. Valve offers beta support for the Legion Go (without an S), the Asus ROG Ally, and the Asus ROG Ally X, and we’ve had success installing the operating system on a wide range of AMD-based laptop and desktop PCs. People who don’t want to wait for the Steam Machine can also try building their own—I’ve done it with good results so far. But you’ll want an AMD Ryzen CPU and Radeon GPU for the best results, and recent Ars testing has found that GPUs with just 8GB of video memory may struggle to run games as well as they run in Windows.