About two months after Valve dramatically raised the price of the Steam Deck OLED, an estimate emerged claiming sales volume fell by an average of 82%. But this figure is not actual sales data published by Valve. It is the result of converting Steam's sales-revenue rankings into independently assumed revenue bands and dividing by an assumed average selling price. The erosion of Steam Deck's price advantage due to the price hike and the conclusion that sales fell 82% need to be considered separately.
A 44–46% price increase changed the pricing assumptions
On May 27, 2026, Valve raised the price of the Steam Deck OLED 512GB from $549 to $789, and the 1TB model from $649 to $949. That's an increase of $240 and $300 respectively, which translates to roughly 44% and 46%. Valve cited rising memory and storage costs as the reason, explicitly stating that the hardware itself remains unchanged.
To buy the same-spec product, buyers now pay $240 more for the 512GB model than before. The 1TB model, meanwhile, is priced just $51 short of $1,000. At this price level, a $999.99 competitor enters the range for official price comparison.
The comparison point, the ROG Xbox Ally X (2025), is priced at $999.99 on ASUS's US store. It features a Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme, 24GB LPDDR5X, a 1TB SSD, an 80Wh battery, and a 1920×1080, 120Hz display. The Steam Deck OLED, by contrast, has a Zen 2 4-core CPU, an RDNA 2 GPU with 8 CUs, 16GB LPDDR5, a 50Wh battery, and a 1280×800 OLED display with up to 90Hz. Because the OS design and power consumption limits differ, the specs alone don't determine which is superior. Still, the price gap between the two 1TB models has narrowed to just $50.99.
How was the "82% decline" calculated?
Boiling Steam started from Steam Deck's position in Steam's global weekly top sellers chart. It treated 2025 Steam Deck rankings as mainly 4th–5th place, and July 2026 rankings as having dropped to 10th–15th place, assigning an independently estimated weekly revenue band to each ranking range.
| Estimate inputs | 2025 | July 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Assumed ranking | 4th–5th | 10th–15th |
| Assumed weekly revenue | $6M–$10M | $1.2M–$2.5M |
| Assumed average selling price | ~$540 | ~$835 |
| Calculated weekly units sold | 11,000–18,000 units | 1,400–3,000 units |
The logic of the calculation is straightforward. In Boiling Steam's estimate, revenue fell 72% while the average selling price rose 54%, which shrinks the estimated unit sales even further, yielding an average 82% decline. However, what Valve actually publishes is the ranking, not the revenue figures behind each ranking. The bands of $6M–$10M and $1.2M–$2.5M are estimates Boiling Steam derived from external data.
The average selling price also involves assumptions. The 2025 figure of roughly $540 was calculated from an assumed sales mix of 25% for the $399 256GB LCD model, 45% for the $549 512GB OLED model, and 30% for the $649 1TB OLED model. For the 2026 figure of roughly $835, no breakdown is given for what ratio of the two OLED models was assumed to have sold. In other words, 82% is a figure derived through two layers of estimation involving undisclosed revenue and an undisclosed model mix. It can serve as material for considering the direction of a sales decline, but it is not sales statistics whose precision can be verified.
Three rankings: 10th, 16th, and 9th
Valve's weekly top sellers chart ranks the top 100 products by revenue earned from Monday at 10:00 AM (Pacific Time) through the following week. It is not based on unit sales. For games, revenue includes not just the base price but also DLC and in-game transactions combined, so Steam Deck's ranking can shift due to major new releases, sales events, or spending trends in free-to-play titles.
Tracking the confirmed weekly charts, Steam Deck ranked 10th for June 30–July 7, 2026, 16th for July 7–14, and 9th for July 14–21. At the time Boiling Steam's article was published on July 20, the final week hadn't yet concluded, and the ranking that was later confirmed climbed back to 9th. The drop to 16th place is confirmed, but the Deck did not remain stuck there.
The comparison points from 2025 are not uniform either. It was ranked 5th in the first week of the year, 7th for the week of June 17–24, and 2nd for the week of December 2–9. While 2026's rankings of 10th and 16th are lower than the confirmed 2025 comparison points, there is no official conversion table that translates a ranking difference directly into a 72% revenue decline. The recent 9th-place ranking doesn't prove a demand recovery either, nor does it confirm the 82% decline figure.
Before a sales collapse, a shrinking price advantage
What can be said from official information is that the Steam Deck OLED, with unchanged specs, has become roughly 44–46% more expensive, and that the 1TB model now sits close in price to a new-generation competitor. In the weeks following the price change, weekly rankings sometimes fell below the three confirmed 2025 checkpoints. The price hike has clearly changed the comparison conditions for buyers considering a Steam Deck.
Even so, there isn't enough information to treat the claimed 82% sales decline as established fact. Unless Valve discloses unit sales or revenue by model, what can be externally confirmed is limited to relative rankings. Over the coming weeks, will the weekly ranking sink back into the middle tier while stock is available, or will it hold around 9th place? That trajectory will make it easier to judge whether the post-price-hike ranking drop was temporary.