Steam Deck 2 in 2028: the memory shortage picked the date

Reports in April put Steam Deck 2 in 2028, with Valve dropping the semi-custom APU of the original for off-the-shelf AMD silicon. Valve has since confirmed the successor is in development without naming a year, so treat 2028 as a rumour. Those reports name component pricing as the cause, tying the launch window to RAM and NAND costs coming back down.

Valve has reshaped its current lineup around the shortage. Valve ran out of Steam Deck OLED stock in the US in February and warned of intermittent memory and storage supply. It has since raised the OLED price, and it has said the Steam Machine was meant to land near $750 before RAM prices moved the target. One July analysis estimated Deck sales fell 82% after that increase. A handheld cannot absorb a memory spike the way a $2,000 desktop can.

LPDDR5X and NAND make up a large share of a handheld's bill of materials, and both come out of the fabs AI buyers are emptying. With hyperscalers and AI labs holding 2027 memory capacity, 2028 is the first year Valve could specify a new handheld at a sane component cost. Sony and Microsoft face the same arithmetic on PlayStation 6 and the next Xbox, so studios keep building new games for the current console generation.

Buy the current Deck if you want a handheld now. Two years is a long wait for hardware that runs the library well today, and Valve has kept improving SteamOS and Proton compatibility through the shortage. For a desktop, the rule is the same: skip the wait for memory-heavy hardware to get cheaper, and spend where the shortage hasn't landed.

That means processors. AMD and Intel have held their chip prices better than memory makers have held DRAM through this cycle, so a CPU upgrade buys the cheapest performance on the board today. The processor rankings show the score-per-pound. When you do buy memory, our memory rankings price each kit at what it costs today rather than at list, which counts for more now that list prices have stopped meaning much.