Gabe Newell says that Valve had to be "very aggressive" on the Steam Deck's pricing

Valve had to "very aggressive" in terms of pricing the Steam Deck, according to president and co-founder Gabe Newell.

Speaking to IGN, Newell described the balancing act the developers had to achieve when pricing the Steam Deck due to “price-performance [being] critical factors in the mobile space.” He continued, saying “we’ve had to be very aggressive, in terms of pricing on the deck [..] I want to pick this up and say oh, it all works, it’s fast, [the] price point was secondary, and painful. But that was pretty clearly a critical aspect to it.”

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The device comes in three different options: the 64GB option for $399, the 256GB option for $529, and the 512GB option for $649. According to Newell himself “the only difference between those is the amount of storage, and the speed of the storage” with the 256GB option containing a NVMe SSD which could rival the likes of the PS5 and Xbox Series X.

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Newell also stated his expectations for the device noting that: "Our view is, if we're doing this right, we're going to be selling these in millions of units, and it's clearly going to be establishing a product category that ourselves and other PC manufacturers are going to be able to participate in."

If you’re considering getting one of the Steam Decks yourself, here is a rundown of what you’ll be getting: the handheld console uses a custom AMD Zen 2 APU to run it, with a quad-core Zen 2 CPU, and 16GB of Ram - which Valve says can comfortably "run the latest AAA games." It also has a battery life of two to eight hours depending on how demanding your gameplay session is and features a USB-C dock to connect it to external displays with up to 4K or 8K output.

Those who manage to get their hands on the console will also get a protective carry case for it, with the largest model also featuring an anti-glare etched glass screen. You can find details on how to secure your console on the Steam website and find out how the pre-orders are going to work which will be live today at 10am PT/1pm ET/6pm BST.

For ideas on what you could be playing on the Steam Deck, take a look at our best PC games list.

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After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training. My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.