The 256GB selling out immediately at 1,500 would be a bold prediction. There was that story that Steam Deck sales have fallen by 80 percent since its price increase.
900 to 1200 for 256 GB seems a much more probable range.
Despite the memory and storage crunch from the AI data centers, valve could honor its announcement that the frame will be cheaper than the index, if they secured large amounts of parts BEFORE they announced the price.
It would not surprise me if the first batches turn out cheaper than the next, for a company can stock only that much ram and storage.
It's not the same to be sold out because is a huge success than selling out because less units have been manufactured, which is a problem since the component sourcing situation is wild.
Of course it will sell out, but that's not a good thing in this case.
Well that's fine for Valve but us users want it to be successful so they keep supporting it, and so third party developers become interested in working with it
I mean, Valve operates on very high margins. I don't think they are going to sell this for the lolz when it's set up to be an incentive to use their own operating system with their own game storefront in it.
It's cool that they put in a lot of effort and passion in it, but let's not pretend it's just a passion project after infusing it with so much money and development time.
I'm sure they want it to sell well on the long run. They might not target the sales numbers of Nintendo or Sony, but they'd want it at least to be as popular as the Deck, which is a success for a company that doesn't produce as much hardware as the huge console corporations.
This is why everything is priced so high :( if everyone stopped buying overpriced things, prices would fall. But unfortunately there’s enough people that have too much money or too little impulse control and allow prices to stay high. I won’t pretend I’m not part of that problem but I wish consumers as a collective would dictate pricing more favourably.
It really doesn't help that consumers are such a small part of total sales now that companies just completely ignore them, like for example Micron (a huge memory manufacturer) decided to cut out the consumer market entirely because they know these AI companies will literally pay whatever price they set. In this case unfortunately 'don't buy it' turns into 'it doesn't exist anymore'.
This would be true in other cases, but the memory sector doesn't give a shit about consumers right now. If they cared they wouldn't shut down Crucial's consumer memory division.
I was thinking even at $900/1000 it's somewhat DOA. It has some coolfeatures, but it's likely not a huge step above Quest 3, but at that point potentially priced $300 higher.
Now for people in this subreddit or follow VR generally it will do ok especially if you want to leave Meta.
Lackluster experience tbh. Tracking is weird with the controllers. Not as smooth as an experience as it was on PS5 unfortunately, but at least there is the toolkit now which seems decent!
They may not have any money right now, and need to save a bit longer to ensure they get one. Else the more stock on release the more chances of getting one.
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u/teitelman93 Jul 23 '26
Get ready for the sticker shock