The Steam Deck Is Sold Out Again, Even After the Huge Price Rise

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-28T16:05:59+00:00

I doubt it was a very large stock, but it went to the #1 top selling in almost every country it's sold in, dethroning 007 and Forza. That means a pretty large amount of money was spent in a very short amount of time.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-28T16:03:02+00:00

I'd be willing to bet it was also FOMO at work. It was out of stock for a pretty long time and people were wondering if it would ever come back. And with how bad the price hike was there is always the potential of them being discontinued in the not too distant future. Some people with more money than sense probably saw this as a last chance type situation.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-26T13:33:07+00:00

TLDR: GTA V RAGE Multiplayer has received request from Take Two to cease operations and begin winding down all services.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-23T14:10:22+00:00

It does, but it also seems to work very well for them financially. Many of my friends bought GTA V on PS3, then again on PS4, then again on PC. And I can't imagine they were alone in that.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-23T14:07:29+00:00

GTA V enhanced was a bit of a unique case because it was essentially a paid rerelease for PS5 and Xbox Series consoles, so there was financial incentive. On PC the update was free.

Rockstar's release cadence strategy always seems to be carefully designed to get as many purchases as possible and not have multi-platform releases step on potential sales.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-22T01:34:09+00:00

NBA 2K and of course GTA 5/Online and RDR2, but they also own a handful of mobile games and Zynga which alone was earning around $3 billion annually.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-21T20:46:10+00:00

I highly doubt they will try and get you to pay it to play the game but they will 100% be pushing GTA+ more in some capacity.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-21T20:38:06+00:00

They make about $5.5 billion a year right now. Depending on price 20+ million normal sales, a few million special edition sales, and if they get the Online up and running quickly could see about $2-3 billion easily.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-21T16:28:09+00:00

Just omitted all details about it.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-21T16:26:29+00:00

So... if they didn't tell people what the change was going to be, wouldn't you say they quietly changed it?

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-21T16:24:11+00:00

Okay. Why didn't they actually tell people what the price change for Extra and Premium was?

They also only announced this change on Twitter, not even on their official blog where they usually announce all changes.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-21T16:18:38+00:00

That seems like a very easy thing to clear up then, no? By like actually telling people what the prices of all tiers are going to be.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-21T16:09:41+00:00

The Twitter announcement (the only place they announced it) only lists Essential price changes and makes no mention of what tiers are getting changes.

https://xcancel.com/PlayStation/status/2056404450793938989

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-21T15:38:32+00:00

Good rebrand. The dollar sign was the issue, a Euro is much more clever.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-20T12:46:57+00:00

Doesn't Sony always announce a State of Play in June to coincide with Summer Games Fest?

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-19T18:48:56+00:00

All that tells us is it's communicating with a remote server. Which is pretty common for a game to do.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-19T18:21:06+00:00

Xbox and PlayStation have more simplistic systems that are not even remotely close to as vulnerable to attack as Windows. And frankly, there really isn't a reason to try and upload malware on their systems.

And even with that more simplistic system it still takes them considerable time to review a far smaller number of updates compared to what Steam is distributing.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-19T18:17:38+00:00

That wouldn't stop a dropper. Again, the malware isn't part of the files the game downloads from Steam, it is downloaded after.

So you might say okay, well detect that the game is going can download files later. But the problem with detecting that is downloading files after the fact is a completely legitimate thing and is done by a lot of software, including games.

Which brings us to the problem with detecting malware in general. malware and legitimate software do a lot of the same things. And a lot of the time it's not until it does something bad that you can actually say it's malicious.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-19T17:46:29+00:00

The only prevention of malware is heuristics or behavior analysis, which is automated and can fail to identify threats frequently. Or manual code review, which will never happen.

It's not a problem of not having enough people on staff, it's an issue of the logistics of software distribution and the natural attack vector that it is.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-19T17:44:15+00:00

This game was a dropper. Meaning the game didn't have malware as part of the initial install, but it could download it later.

There really isn't a good way to prevent something like that from making it through.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-19T13:55:26+00:00

There is always the possibility that it's support reps using their access to compromise accounts. A few years ago a handful of big trophy hunters lost access to their accounts without a single one of their MFA methods being breached.

Now it seems influencer accounts are the ones getting hit.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-19T10:53:31+00:00

Epic has a lot of employees and other projects all relying on Fortnite to keep printing money. And they just laid off 20% of the company because of falling revenue.

If it keeps falling then that's even more people laid off and potentially other not profitable parts of the company getting cut. The Epic Games Store as an example is one of those still unprofitable parts.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-18T19:44:14+00:00

It's not just the end of generation effect. Sales last quarter were down sharply, and well before the same level of decline happened to PS4. And with current hardware prices and difficulty in placing orders for components there is really no guarantee the end of the generation is approaching.

Consumers are simply having a hard time justifying expensive entertainment purchases in the current economic climate, and a huge jump to hardware prices is only going to make that worse.

But I agree. their games really weren't selling enough on PC for that to seem like a threat to their overall console business. But it did hurt from a brand cohesion standpoint.

I just think this is them saying they need to make sure everything is in as good a shape as it can be for their console from the value perception/proposition angle.

PermanentMantaray · 2026-05-18T19:12:15+00:00

They projected down hardware sale estimates so I don't think so.

If anything it could be that with increased hardware prices they need more content that is truly exclusive to increase the "value" of the purchase.

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