The current Deck pricing is probably out of their hands, memory prices are crazy. It’s not just Valve, the Lenovo legion go handhelds went up by about $400 for the 16GB models and $600-700 for the 32GB models. The Asus ROG/Xbox handhelds haven’t increased in price yet, but I suspect that probably means they either overestimated demand or were able to negotiate a fixed price contract before prices got crazy. Either way they’ll probably shoot up soon as well.
The controller has less reason to be expensive, although it does have several premium features beyond your normal controller. They priced it between something like an standard xbox controller ($65) and an xbox elite controller ($150-200), so in that context it doesn’t seem that bad.
The current Deck pricing is probably out of their hands, memory prices are crazy. It’s not just Valve, the Lenovo legion go handhelds went up by about $400 for the 16GB models and $600-700 for the 32GB models. The Asus ROG/Xbox handhelds haven’t increased in price yet, but I suspect that probably means they either overestimated demand or were able to negotiate a fixed price contract before prices got crazy. Either way they’ll probably shoot up soon as well.
The controller has less reason to be expensive, although it does have several premium features beyond your normal controller. They priced it between something like an standard xbox controller ($65) and an xbox elite controller ($150-200), so in that context it doesn’t seem that bad.