The Great Steam Deck Crash of 2026: How the New Pricing Decreased Demand by 80%

Summary

Following our recent article estimating the volume of Steam Machines currently sold on the market, I wanted to also go back to another very interesting piece of data and question: has the change of price of the Steam Deck in May 2026 had a big impact on the number of its sales? Not just in value, but in units sold? Turns out, we should be able to answer the question using a similar methodology and the weekly top sellers charts. This chart lists the ranking of all products according to their sales in total dollars, regardless of the software or hardware aspect. Throughout 2025, Valve’s Steam Deck maintained a steady presence in the top five positions of Steam’s Global Weekly Top Sellers chart. Week after week, the SteamOS powered handheld managed to stay around rank #4 or #5, hardly impacted by seasonality. If anything, it was propped up by specific times in the year, such as the pre-christmas season. In early 2026, it suffered some temporary availability issues because of key components preventing its full assembly. It came back at the end of May 2026, with fresh inventory and a fresh (or stinky, depending on your point of view) price as well. On May 27, 2026 Valve announced the pricing adjustment, framed internally as a response to the RAMpocalypse. This was a massive price hike across models, in the +40% range on OLED models, and getting rid of the cheaper LCD version altogether. Valve is not in the charity business anymore. Move away, peasants! So what effect did it have in the charts? The answer is in this cute little graph below. While the rank of the Steam Deck in the Top Sellers List seemed stable at first once it was back, it has fallen like a stone from the top 5 to the 14th position for the past 2 weeks. To casual observers, a six-to-eight position slide could seem like a small change. But when you translate Steam’s revenue-weighted ranking back into actual sales, the underlying shift is massive: we estimate that this could represent as much as a 82% decli...