Since its 2022 launch, the Steam Deck has consistently been at or near the top of the company's "top selling products by revenue" charts, with brief dips outside of the top 10 treated as newsworthy events. But sales of the popular handheld gaming PC have apparently been on a steep decline since the system relaunched at a higher price in May.

Linux-focused gaming site Boiling Steam breaks down the historical data, showing how the Deck's chart position has fallen from fifth place immediately after orders resumed in late May down to 14th place for two weeks in early July (the hardware sits at 12th place in the current edition of those charts).

That's in sharp contrast to 2025, when the Steam Deck never dropped below seventh place on the bestseller charts and was only rarely outside the Top 5. Then Valve warned of "intermittent shortages" for the Steam Deck starting in February, leading to weeks of lower chart positions before the Deck became completely unavailable until May.

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Since Sony announced that it was planning to stop producing physical PlayStation discs in 2028, many people have been justifiably worried about how they will maintain ownership and long-term game access in a disc-free world. But halting production of PlayStation discs also means eliminating the market for cheap used PlayStation discs, which are often available for well below the price of a digital download.

How much is this disc-based discount worth? To find out, Ars analyzed how the prices of 19 current top-selling PlayStation games varied between digital downloads and physical discs (both new and used). We found that, while used discs are the cheapest option for most games for most of the year, the frequent and periodic deep discounts offered on the PlayStation Store often undercut the cheapest game disc options. That state of affairs will likely persist even in a future without PlayStation discs.

Our prices are so low, you'll think we've suffered brain damage

For our analysis, we started with Sony's list of the bestsellers on the PlayStation Store. We eliminated any games that weren't available on a physical disc, then used the database over at PlatPrices.com to determine both the "Standard" price and the lowest "Discount" price offered for those games on the PlayStation Store in the last year (as well as the total number of days the discount price was offered).

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About a month ago, Valve announced that it would expand its long-standing Steam Deck Verified program to the now-shipping Steam Machine, offering a separate rating of Steam games' compatibility and playability for the fresh living room-focused hardware. Now that those ratings started appearing on Steam store pages last night (under a "Learn More" link next to Steam Deck Compatibility), we've found that Valve is frustratingly "still learning about" Steam Machine compatibility for dozens of games that the Steam Deck is too weak to run capably.

The Steam Machine compatibility for many Steam games is pretty simple to figure out, of course. If a game is already verified on Steam Deck, it is seemingly guaranteed to be verified on the Steam Machine, as far as we can tell. On the other side, games that have already been confirmed not to work with SteamOS (which can happen for various reasons) obviously won't work on the SteamOS-powered Steam Machine.

The messy middle is where a Steam Machine Verified badge could come in most handy. These are games that Valve has confirmed will load on SteamOS, but which the aging, portable Steam Deck can't handle at the 1200x800, 30 fps standard that Valve requires at default settings (for the Steam Machine, this requirement grows to 1080p and 30 fps). On the Steam Store, these games show up as "Unsupported" on Steam Deck because "the game's graphics settings cannot be configured to run well on Steam Deck" or "this game requires manual configuration of graphics settings to perform well on Steam Deck."

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