I suspect that the Steam Deck is sold out because YouTubers and TikTok influencers just discovered it, and they're squawking all about it—and this has more to do with its unavailability than the RAM shortage.
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I suspect that the Steam Deck is sold out because YouTubers and TikTok influencers just discovered it, and they’re squawking all about it—and this has more to do with its unavailability than the RAM shortage.
It’s 2026. Steam Deck is four years old—which is about as long as I owned it.
When it was released, it was mostly ignored because the original Steam Machine, Steam Link and Steam Controller were failures. And everyone just assumed this was going to be yet another Valve disaster.
But nevertheless I got one because my rationale was, “I don’t care if Valve never makes another console ever again, I just want to play my PC games on the go.”
Fast forward to now. It’s not just PC gamers that have adopted it. Console gamers too. Because they now know that the Steam Deck is an emulation power house—which is the hook.
But then when they start fooling around the Steam store, they realize it has AAA and indie games too. Games that are not available on consoles, and may never arrive there. So much stuff that if you blink, you just might miss it.
So these folks are now inundating various social media platforms, talking about how Steam Deck can do more than they expected. It therefore doesn’t surprise me that all models are sold out.
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I suspect that the Steam Deck is sold out because YouTubers and TikTok influencers just discovered it, and they’re squawking all about it—and this has more to do with its unavailability than the RAM shortage.
It’s 2026. Steam Deck is four years old—which is about as long as I owned it.
When it was released, it was mostly ignored because the original Steam Machine, Steam Link and Steam Controller were failures. And everyone just assumed this was going to be yet another Valve disaster.
But nevertheless I got one because my rationale was, “I don’t care if Valve never makes another console ever again, I just want to play my PC games on the go.”
Fast forward to now. It’s not just PC gamers that have adopted it. Console gamers too. Because they now know that the Steam Deck is an emulation power house—which is the hook.
But then when they start fooling around the Steam store, they realize it has AAA and indie games too. Games that are not available on consoles, and may never arrive there. So much stuff that if you blink, you just might miss it.
So these folks are now inundating various social media platforms, talking about how Steam Deck can do more than they expected. It therefore doesn’t surprise me that all models are sold out.
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org I remember a lot of people were excited for it, but I think people were anxious about proton compatibility, which has improved since.
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@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org I remember a lot of people were excited for it, but I think people were anxious about proton compatibility, which has improved since.
@KitsuneVixi I was betting upon Proton being terrible. But I was going to be happy if only native Linux games were going to be playable. I had several Linux laptops, and Steam was great on them.
What I didn’t know was that Proton has made nearly 98% of my gaming library playable.
