The best generation of handheld games is already over

For a few years of glory, the $399 portable device can handle everything you want to play. In 2022, Steam Deck finally made PC gaming portable and cheap. I played through many Elden ring on the Steam Deck, agape that such a rich world could fit comfortably between my two hands.

Today, what happened on the Steam Deck it starts at $789 – almost double the price.

Likewise, the Nintendo Switch cost $299 at launch — but after Nintendo’s Switch 2 ended with a “market shift,” the starting price for Nintendo’s modern gaming handhelds. it will soon be $499more than the PS5’s minimal cost at launch.

You can say so what: isn’t everything expensive right now? Welcome to RAMMageddontariffs, and rising oil prices because of Trump’s war on Iran. And I can’t blame Nintendo or Valve. Heck, I applaud them for being among the last to raise prices.

“Console gaming continues to move slowly and steadily towards a better place,” my colleague Andrew Webster. he wrote earlier this monthand shows how Sony and Microsoft have raised prices several times and that Nintendo was one of the last products to be saved. (How he wrote again everything about buying games is confusing and expensive – and remember when games comfort prices went down instead of up?)

Meanwhile, PC gamers are starting to worry that their favorite hobby might not be cheap, as RAM and storage prices have skyrocketed and every chip maker is pushing AI servers. (Nvidia is not a gaming company again.)

But handhelds hit differently. They were supposed to be a cheap alternative to consoles and PCs, and I can’t help but feel bad that they had less time in the full sun.

There wasn’t enough time for a real Valve or Nintendo competitor to come out – no other developer challenged them on price, market share accordingly. When Microsoft woke up to the threat of Steam Deck to push Windows players to Linux, it said at $1,000 instead of $400, Xbox Ally X prices as a PC instead of a console.

At $789 instead of $399, the Steam Deck may no longer be a threat to Microsoft’s dominance of Windows gaming. For those with cash to spare, it makes the $1,000 Microsoft/Asus Xbox Ally X look good, considering. how much power you get for that price and how Microsoft continues to release on correcting his mistakes.

Any other gaming PC with a price tag costs more than this one: the Lenovo Legion Go S it is almost twice its opening price at an amazing price of $1,579.99, The Legion Go 2 costs about $2,000 with the same chip as the Xbox Ally X, and the list of leaked products shows Intel’s new mobile platform won’t come cheap. The MSI Claw 8 AI Plus it’s gone from $1,000 to $1,299 (although I still see it on sale for “only” $1,099).

At these prices in today’s world, we are no longer talking about the same type of medicine. It’s no longer “you can try it on your hands and get the joy of gaming anywhere.” It’s “maybe you should choose a handheld instead of something else.”

The zero-sum thinking can affect the price of these handhelds in other ways too – one of the interesting things about the Steam Deck was. how it made the biggest games for the PlayStation portablebut Sony says It won’t be bringing its big single-player games to PC either. I’m taking the ball and going home.

When I bought my Steam Deck in 2022, I wasn’t sure it would pay off, that I would be a handheld gamer again. I had a very nice home-built PC.

But I didn’t need to be convinced. It only costs $400. That’s not pocket change – but it’s not rent. I know I wouldn’t have bought a $1,000 cell phone back then. I’m sorry if I do.