Buying a Steam Deck

I mentioned a while back in January 2024 how I really wanted a Steam Deck. It seemed like a dream come true for a traditionally console gamer wanting to dabble in PC gaming. I certainly couldn’t justify the cost of a desktop gaming rig or a higher end laptop, but the Steam Deck is closer in price to (or even cheaper than) consoles. Furthermore, it maintains that console simplicity with SteamOS where you just select a game from your library and install it. Everything about the Steam Deck seemed to be exactly what I wanted, it checked all the boxes.

As with any big purchase that I’m considering, I did a deep dive. Buyer’s remorse is awful and I tend to be more able to avoid it by digging in and understanding the product before I buy it. If I realize it isn’t what I need or I don’t want it as bad as I thought, I can pull the ripcord and get out before I’ve spent any money. It isn’t fool-proof, but it’s pretty effective.

I looked up reviews. I joined the subreddit. I asked friends what they thought about it. One friend offered to sell me his for $500, but I told him I wasn’t in the market for one quite yet. The universal consensus was that they’re incredible little devices. They can play most games, even newer games, at least with mid-range graphics settings. Several people mentioned using sunshine/moonlight to remote into their gaming rig, but many did play natively right on the device. Everybody seemed to praise it to the high heavens.

For several months, I deliberated on it. Admittedly, we didn’t really have the money for it and I absolutely didn’t need it. We have two Nintendo Switch consoles and a Playstation 4. The local library has tons of free games available to check out. EVENTUALLY, as new games stop getting released on those platforms and my backlog dries up, maybe then I could argue that we need it in an entertainment context. But there were certainly other options to fulfill our gaming needs as a family.

After a while, the interest faded a bit. I was still curious, but I knew I wouldn’t bite, at least not for a while. I would keep an eye on it and stay up to date with the news, but making a purchase just wouldn’t be in the cards for a while. Couple that with the unexpected replacement of our washing machine (being an adult sucks) and we didn’t really have any discretionary funds available. Play purchases would have to wait.

Some time later, I was looking into how to play Castlevania: Curse of Darkness, an old PS2 game that wasn’t very popular but I really enjoyed. I didn’t trust that my Surface Pro 7 could handle PS2 emulation, but Curse of Darkness never got ported to any newer systems. Eventually, I did get Curse of Darkness running on my Surface in PCSX2 through EmuDeck, but I just KNEW it would be a better experience on a Steam Deck. Plus, Ratchet: Deadlocked ran at frame rates in the low teens; completely unplayable. If I were going to experience one of my old favorites in a portable form factor, it would require new hardware.

This reignited my interest. I couldn’t really afford to buy a Steam Deck right away, but what if I saved up? Specifically, what if I started banking money that never makes it into the budget to begin with? I donate platelets every other week with a local blood bank. Each donation normally gets me 3600 points, which can be redeemed for $90 in various gift cards. What if I used THOSE to buy a Steam Deck?

Normally, I get Walmart or Amazon gift cards for groceries or whatever thing we were going to buy anyway. However, the blood bank also offers prepaid Visa debit cards. What if I started using half the points on Walmart for groceries and half went to a prepaid Visa? I could then add the Visa to my Steam account, buy wallet funds with the debit card, and just save up in my Steam wallet until I could afford the full cost of the device.

On October 7, 2024, I decided to put my theory to the test. I used my points to get a $20 Visa. I then added the Visa to my Steam account. I added $10 to my wallet with the Visa and it worked! I tried to add another $10, but Steam claimed there were insufficient funds. Turns out it takes a few weeks for the pending charge to fall off. Regardless, the solution was before me. Donate blood, trade points for a prepaid card, convert the prepaid card to Steam wallet money. All I needed was time.

The one downside to prepaid debit cards is that they’re always “recently activated” and Steam can’t verify them. Only penalty is that you can’t buy from the Community Marketplace for a few days. If you want to buy some trading cards, do it before you add a new debit card or wait a week after. Small price to pay.

An unexpected side effect was less guilt when buying games and stuff on Steam. Once the money goes into my Steam wallet, it’s not like I can take it back out. Besides, it wasn’t REAL money to begin with. Stardew Valley for $7.49? Sure. Trading cards to make a trophy for 50 cents? Why not? I’m still saving toward the Deck, but I can drop a few bucks here and there without deliberating on whether I REALLY want Mass Effect enough to justify $4.79. It’s less than a Lincoln.

Originally, I couldn’t decide what Steam Deck I wanted, but I knew WHEN I wanted it. With my birthday in June and the Steam Summer Sale in late June or early July, I figured I could just save up Steam money until then and see what I could afford. Either I would buy a refurbished model, or I would wait and see what kind of discounts were available on new models.

Over time, that thought process changed. The original Steam Deck launched in February 2022. As February 2025 came and passed, the Steam Deck platform turned 3 years old. Valve has frequently said that they didn’t want to release new Steam Decks frequently, especially not with the annual updates like with phones and tablets. They’re much more inclined to stay with a more console-esque release cadence and provide substantial improvements between generations, IF they released a generation 2 Steam Deck at all.

However, the Steam Deck has been an absurd success. There’s no way that Valve doesn’t continue with the platform. And even if there is no explicit Steam Deck 2, SteamOS is now available to third party manufacturers. As new devices with SteamOS come out, older models become more and more outdated and less and less valuable. I wouldn’t want to sink money on the top model just to have it immediately obsolete.

Instead, I started eyeing the 64GB LCD model. It wasn’t available NEW anymore, but the refurb option was occasionally restocked at a price point of only $279. The only new LCD model is the 256GB option for $399, compared to the refurb cost of $319. In either case, I’m in for substantially less than any new console. And even if I were to use it as nothing more than an emulation machine, that’s still very affordable.

Plus, Valve is very big on the Right-to-Repair. The Deck is super easy to disassemble, and you can swap any SSD of the same form into the device. I could realistically buy the 64GB model and immediately replace the drive with a 2TB SSD and have more storage than literally any stock option available from Valve. Plus, I could stick a 1TB micro SD card in and have 3TB of games at my disposal whenever. Lower tier Decks were starting to look more and more attractive.

As of March 11, I had over $350. At that point, I could afford a refurbished 64GB or 256GB LCD Steam Deck with JUST my blood money, provided they were in stock. The problem is that refurb options are very rarely in stock when I check. Whenever I opened the Steam app, I would take a look, but every option was listed as out of stock every time I checked. Outside of large quantity drops, what are the chances that I would check the store coincidentally within minutes of them adding a few?

I started looking for stock alert options. A few people had different paid services to provide alerts, but there’s no way I’m paying you to tell me when something is available. One guy on reddit had a custom Python application he wrote to screen scrape and provide alerts to himself, with the code available on GitHub. But then I found a Discord chat that someone on reddit mentioned. You could subscribe to the specific region and models that you were interested in, and turn on notifications to be tagged when they were in stock.

Immediately, I joined the Discord group and turned on notifications for all refurb models in the US. For background, I also skimmed through the most recent messages in the us-notifications channel. It looked like the most recent stock for 256GB and 512GB were available on March 6. Only a few minutes separated in stock and out of stock messages, but I should have time to add one to my cart and check out if I saw the notification quickly enough. Oddly, the 64GB model didn’t seem to be included in that restock.

I looked further back to February 19, where a lot of other models seemed to be available. Still no 64GB message. I KEPT scrolling back to February 5, when the 64GB model seemed to be available for about 9 minutes. It seemed like the 64GB models were the least frequently listed and the most quickly purchased out of all refurbished options, which didn’t entirely surprise me. The idea to buy the smallest model and upgrade the drive certainly wasn’t one I came up with on my own, and I’m sure a lot of people on the internet wanted to do the same thing.

With refurb models so intermittently available and the 64GB model especially rare, I cemented my decision to buy the next 64GB or 256GB model as soon as I got a stock alert from Discord. If refurbished stock cleared out in less than 10 minutes in most cases, I wouldn’t have any opportunity to sleep on it or deliberate. I needed to know with certainty that I wanted to spend the money before the opportunity even arose. Buyer’s remorse would just have to be a possibility.

With stock alerts enabled, I started checking my phone notifications religiously. Where I would previously have a full notification slide most of the time for things that I eventually wanted to deal with, I started immediately handling even the most inconsequential notification. If my phone vibrated, I instinctively checked the source. It’s a good thing I don’t use Discord a ton, because it probably would’ve given me anxiety seeing the icon and realizing it wasn’t a Steam Deck restock.

For several weeks, I didn’t see a single stock notification. I wondered if I had properly configured Discord notifications, but I checked the restock channel and found no new messages. I wondered if the restock bot was missing restocks, but I checked the actual refurb page and all models were consistently sold out. No, they just genuinely didn’t have any refurbished Steam Decks available.

On Friday, March 28 at just after 1pm, I got a restock notification for the 1TB OLED model. My first reaction was celebration that the restock bot DID work, and I DID get notifications as expected. My second reaction was frustration that the one model that got restocked was the one model I couldn’t afford. I already had $400 in my Steam wallet, and I had just donated blood that morning, so I had another $100 on the way. Even with the $500, I needed another $55 to be able to afford that particular model. I couldn’t donate blood again for a full week, and most restocks previously sold out in a matter of minutes or hours. Nothing that I noticed lasted a week. As excited as I was to see a restock, I had to curtail my excitement with the realistic probability that it would sell out before I could buy it.

Sure, I could’ve paid the remaining $55 from my credit card. Steam even makes it easy to pay only the difference that your wallet funds won’t cover. But I figured that if my blood money wouldn’t cover it, it wasn’t meant to be. If I made it to Friday and donated blood again, I would buy the 1TB OLED. If another model restocked before Friday, I would buy that. And worst case scenario, if the 1TB OLED sold out before Friday and another model didn’t restock, I simply wouldn’t get to buy one this week.

This also reminded me of another concern. We were leaving to go on a cruise on Sunday, April 6. If the refurbished models restocked while I was out of the country and unconnected to the internet, there was no way I could know until it was too late to order one. Alternatively, what if I bought one and it was scheduled to arrive while we were away? (Spoiler: I found out.) I would just have to operate with the understanding that I would be unavailable then, and simply hope that it wasn’t my only opportunity to buy a Steam Deck.

On Wednesday, April 2 just after 1pm, I got a restock notification for both the 64GB and 512GB LCD models. Although my original plan was to get the 64GB model and swap in a larger 2TB SSD, I called an audible with myself and decided to get the 512GB model. It was half a terabyte, which would be more than enough for a significant number of games, it required no work, and it used money I already had allocated to my Steam wallet. I added it to my cart as quickly as possible and immediately checked out. At $384.13 after taxes and fees, it was still cheaper than the advertised price for the Nintendo Switch 2 announced earlier that day.

I wondered if the 1TB OLED would still be in stock on Friday when I would have been eligible to donate blood again. I wondered if I would regret getting the LCD when I could have gotten the fancy OLED screen. But by 8pm on April 3, ALL models were sold out. The OLED I was lusting over, the 512GB LCD that I ended up getting, and the 64GB model that I was originally dead set on were all out of stock. Turns out I made the right call.

It's like the world's biggest GBA.

With the order placed, I was then confronted with another (lesser) problem. There was very little chance that my order would be delivered before Sunday. We would be out of town for a full week. I didn’t anticipate needing to sign for the delivery, but I also didn’t want a relatively expensive device sitting on my front porch or in my mailbox for someone to potentially steal or an unexpectedly strong storm to destroy.

No worries, my old college roommate was typically good for one day out of my past vacations to come down and check on my cat. I would just ask him to swing by on or after the estimated delivery day and grab it for me. Unfortunately for me, he was also going to be out of town all week. We checked with my mother-in-law and she was able to come grab our mail and check on the cat several days that week. Crisis averted!

With an expected delivery date on Tuesday, I would be at or near Nassau when my Steam Deck was supposed to arrive: far out of cellular range and unable to check on my package. Alas, no sense in letting a potential delivery mishap spoil my vacation. I decided to enjoy myself and deal with any issues once we got back home. Lo and behold, we arrived home with a cardboard box and a neat stack of mail on our kitchen counter. My Steam Deck was delivered with no problem.

I was able to set it up with minimal effort. Just sign into Steam and it pretty much works. I downloaded Stardew Valley and that ran fine (it better). I also moved my EmuDeck installation from my Surface to the Steam Deck with only a few issues related to my unfamiliarity with Linux. Playstation 2 and GameCube titles run great, and eventually I’ll get around to trying some more demanding games.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll familiarize myself with SteamOS and the Steam Deck hardware. I’ll probably eventually write a review of some sort, and I’ll definitely review a lot of these games that I can finally play. For now, I’m just really enjoying the device. I made the decision, I saved up the points, and I bought a Steam Deck with nothing but blood money. That’s really cool, and I’m glad I did it.