So the prices never go back down.
So, the bottleneck here is really the memory prices, and while Steam Deck sales do affect memory prices
as with anyone buying anything with memory
my guess is that it's a pretty small factor relative to other devices using memory.
According to WP, the Steam Deck has 16GB and sold uh, 4 million units over its entire lifetime as of February this year. It's been out for four years. So figure ~64 petabytes of DRAM over its lifetime, or ~16 petabytes of DRAM per year.
For comparison, in a single year, looking at smartphones:
https://wifihifi.com/1-25b-smartphone-units-produced-in-2025-apple-samsung-tied-for-tops/
1.25B Smartphone Units Produced in 2025, Apple & Samsung Tied for Tops
Global Smartphone Average DRAM Hits Record 8.4GB in 2025
8.4 GB is the per-phone average, including older phones, so this is probably a conservative estimate, but assume for 2025, that meant that phone manufacture consumed ~10,500 petabytes of DRAM in a single year.
EDIT: And I'm sure that AI consumers dwarf that, given announcements about how much OpenAI alone was buying 40% of global capacity.
EDIT2: And if one wants local LLMs
I'd like to run my LLMs locally, not have some cloud provider do it
and you assume maybe 1% capacity utilization, then we're going to need something like 100 times what the cloud AI companies are getting in RAM to get to that point.
So, yeah, Steam Deck purchasers do count towards demand for memory, but...I don't think that they likely move the needle all that much alone.