The golden age of handheld gaming is already over

For a few glorious years, a $399 portable gadget could run almost anything you’d want to play. In 2022, the Steam Deck finally made PC gaming portable and affordable. I played through the vast majority of Elden Ring on a Steam Deck, agape that such a rich world could comfortably fit between my two hands.

Today, that Steam Deck experience starts at $789 — nearly double the price.

Similarly, a Nintendo Switch cost $299 at launch — but after Nintendo’s Switch 2 upgrades and “changes in market conditions,” the starting price of today’s Nintendo handheld gaming experience will soon be $499, more than a disc-less PS5 cost at launch.

You might say so what: doesn’t everything cost more right now? Welcome to RAMageddon, tariffs, and rising oil prices due to Trump’s war on Iran. And I can’t fully blame Nintendo or Valve. Heck, I credit them for being among the last to raise prices.

“Console gaming is continuing its slow and steady march towards becoming a niche, luxury good,” my colleague Andrew Webster wrote earlier this month, pointing out how both Sony and Microsoft have hiked prices multiple times and that Nintendo was one of the last holdouts. (He also wrote how everything about buying games is getting more confusing and expensive — and remember when game consoles used to go down in price instead of up?)

Meanwhile, desktop PC gamers are beginning to worry their hobby may never be affordable again, now that RAM and storage prices have skyrocketed and every chipmaker is chasing AI servers. (Nvidia isn’t even officially a gaming company anymore.)

But handhelds hit different. They were supposed to be the affordable alternative to consoles and PCs, and I can’t help feeling sad they had such a short time in the full sun.

There wasn’t even enough time for a true Valve or Nintendo competitor to emerge — no other manufacturer ever meaningfully challenged them on price, ceding the market accordingly. When Microsoft finally woke up to the Steam Deck’s threat of pushing Windows gamers toward Linux, it did so at $1,000 instead of $400, pricing the Xbox Ally X like a PC instead of a console.

At $789 rather than $399, the Steam Deck may no longer be a threat to Microsoft’s dominance over Windows gaming. For those with the spare cash, it makes a $1,000 Microsoft / Asus Xbox Ally X actually look good, considering how much more power you get at that price and how Microsoft keeps plugging away at fixing its flaws.

Every other handheld gaming PC worth its salt costs even more than that now: the Lenovo Legion Go S is nearly double its launch price at a staggering $1,579.99, the Legion Go 2 costs nearly $2,000 with the same chip as the Xbox Ally X, and leaked retail listings suggest Intel’s new handheld platform won’t be much cheaper. The MSI Claw 8 AI Plus has gone from $1,000 to $1,299 (though I still see it on sale for “only” $1,099).

At these prices in today’s world, we’re just not talking about the same kind of product anymore. It’s no longer “you can afford to try a handheld and experience the joy of gaming everywhere.” It’s “you probably have to choose a handheld instead of something else.”

That kind of zero-sum thinking may impact the value of these handhelds in other ways, too — one of the joys of the Steam Deck was how it made PlayStation’s biggest games portable, but Sony reportedly won’t bring its big single-player games to PC anymore. It’s taking that ball and going home.

When I bought my Steam Deck in 2022, I wasn’t sure it would pay off, that I would truly become a handheld gamer again. I already had a perfectly good homebuilt PC.

But I didn’t need to be sure. It only cost $400. That’s not pocket change — but it’s not rent money, either. I know I wouldn’t have bought a $1,000 handheld back then. I’m torn on whether I would now.