Valve stunned gamers this week with steep price hikes on its flagship Steam Deck OLED models. The 512GB version now lists for $789, up from previous levels by 43 percent. The 1TB model climbed to $949, a 46 percent increase. In pounds, buyers in the UK face tags of £649 and £779 respectively. The company pointed squarely at component costs. Memory and storage prices have climbed sharply. Global logistics added further pressure. Yet the device itself remains unchanged. No new hardware revisions accompanied the announcement. Just higher numbers on the sticker. Valve detailed its reasoning in a blog post on Steam . “The current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole” drove the decision. Shortages of RAM, the memory chips essential to modern computing, sit at the heart of the matter. Demand from data centers that power artificial intelligence training has pushed those prices higher. But the story runs deeper than one product line.…