Valve has lowered the price of 256GB Steam tires enough to make it cheaper than the original Nintendo Switch for Black Friday. Hardware prices have followed a worrying trend lately, with rising RAM demand and macroeconomic changes driving console costs ever higher, but there is some temporary relief on the horizon. Anyone hoping to grab a Steam deck for the holidays has a great opportunity to do so right now.
The Steam Deck has remained one of the more affordable handhelds on the market, even though its OLED models cost roughly the same as a current-gen console. Valve has also recently disappointed some fans by confirming that the Steam Machine will not be as affordable as some had hoped, as it will not have a subsidized price. However, there is some good news on the Valve hardware front now that the company has unveiled its Black Friday deals.
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The LCD Steam Deck is $20 cheaper than the Switch for Black Friday
Steam's first-ever Black Friday sale, which runs through December 1st, includes 20% off the 256GB LCD Steam Deck model. Valve offered the same discount on the Steam Deck earlier in 2025, so anyone who missed that sale has another chance to grab the handheld for nearly $80 below MSRP this time around. It's also worth noting that the discounted price of $319.20 is $20 less than what the original Nintendo Switch retails for, and the Steam Deck is a more powerful system.
Only the older, non-OLED Steam Deck model is on sale for Black Friday, so gamers hoping to grab one of the newer variants with a bigger screen and more storage for a low price are out of luck. Still, it's a hard value to overlook compared to the Switch. Notably, Nintendo's Black Friday 2025 sale doesn't include any discounts on either the original Switch or Switch 2, with most of its deals revolving around games rather than hardware. The Steam Deck's sale price also puts the cost of a new 256GB model around what Valve normally charges for a refurbished version.
The discounted price of the LCD Steam Deck may also come as a sigh of relief in light of the broader handheld market of late. The shiny new ROG Xbox Ally retails for $599.99, and the more powerful ROG Xbox Ally X will set gamers back an eye-watering $999.99. Barring any major sales on these, $320 for a Steam Deck, even an older model, looks like one of the best deals on laptops right now.
- Stamp
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steam (valve)
- Original release date
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February 25, 2022
- Original MSRP (USD)
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$399-$649
- Operating system
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SteamOS 3 (Ark-based)
- Processor
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Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5 GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32)
- Resolution
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1200 x 800
Source: Steam
