Steam Deck 2 is still coming — but a RAM crisis is making it harder to keep affordable

Valve says the ongoing RAM shortage has not derailed Steam Deck 2, even as component prices have jumped 200–300% and the current OLED model has already become noticeably more expensive. The company's senior engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told IGN that the team's goals remain unchanged — but getting there depends on timing the market right.

The performance bar

Griffais was clear that Valve won't ship a Steam Deck 2 unless it offers a meaningful performance leap over the current OLED model. In his own words:

> "We've spoken about wanting to make sure there's a clear performance improvement for the next Steam Deck, and I think we still look at it the same way. It's really just a matter of assessing the current conditions and figuring out when and how we can ship something like that. But in terms of what we're working on, the user experience, the product we're trying to build — those goals haven't changed."

Affordability is explicitly part of that calculation. Valve has no interest in releasing the most powerful portable PC on the market if the price locks out the majority of buyers.

The pricing problem

That concern is already playing out with the current generation. Steam Deck OLED prices rose by $240 (512GB) and $300 (1TB) in May 2026, per GameRant. Valve also discontinued the entry-level LCD model in late 2025. The culprit is an industry-wide memory shortage, driven not by gaming demand but by AI data centers hoovering up high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for chips like Nvidia's accelerators — leaving consumer DRAM supply squeezed.

Valve has reportedly had to negotiate hard just to source components for the Steam Machine. The company also revised pricing and timelines for the Steam Frame VR headset, which recently opened pre-orders from $1,059.

What 2028 means

No official release window exists for Steam Deck 2. The 2028 date comes from well-known hardware leaker KeplerL2 and lines up with Valve's own stated philosophy of waiting until the technology is mature enough to justify the upgrade. A 2028 launch would also put it squarely alongside Sony's anticipated PS6 and next-generation Xbox hardware — meaning Valve is positioning Steam Deck 2 as a peer, not a pioneer.

If the memory market stabilizes by then, newer chips based on AMD's Zen 5 and RDNA 4 architectures could give Valve the performance headroom it needs without pushing the price beyond what most people are willing to spend. Whether that happens is still an open question.