Steam Deck is as cheap as Nintendo Switch in latest Black Friday 2025 sale

For Black Friday, you might want to splurge on a discounted Steam Deck instead of saving your money for the no doubt pricier Steam Machine.

2026 stands to be an intriguing year for video games, now that Valve is renewing its efforts to break into the hardware market by reviving its Steam Machine concept, which is essentially a PC in a gaming console shell.

The idea initially failed because it was too expensive, and the new one isn’t likely to be cheap either, with its price expected to be more comparable to a PC than a PlayStation 5.

If you’ve ever been interested in entering the Steam ecosystem yourself, but have always felt intimidated by PC prices, this Black Friday has provided a more affordable option with Valve’s Steam Deck. Especially compared to newer rival devices like the ROG Ally.

The Steam Deck is a handheld PC capable of running thousands of compatible games, including big names like God Of War, The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, and, most recently, Arc Raiders.

It launched in 2022 and although it’s been favourably compared to the Nintendo Switch, and is successful enough to spawn plenty of imitators, it’s always been a niche device – in part due to its price tag.

How much is the Steam Deck for Black Friday 2025?

Usually, the Steam Deck, even at its cheapest, would set you back £349, but for Black Friday week, Valve is selling it at a 20% discount, bringing it down to a far more enticing £279.20.

That’s slightly less than the original Nintendo Switch was when it launched. Nintendo has since permanently reduced the Switch 1 to £259.99, but the Steam Deck being only £20 more is still a great bargain, considering the number of games it can run.

Like the Switch, there is a dock you can use to connect the Steam Deck to a monitor if you prefer playing games on a big screen. Unfortunately, the dock for the Steam Deck is a separate purchase and remains full price at £69.

Although the concept of Steam Deck 2 has been hinted at, Valve has said that any such follow-up won’t happen for some time. So if you do buy one now it’s not going to be superseded anytime soon.

It must be stressed that this discount is only for the LCD model. The more expensive OLED models, which have larger storage spaces and longer battery lives, have seen no such discount. The offer is also only set to last until next Monday on December 1.

Nintendo is running its own Black Friday sales too, but so far is only cutting prices on select games and merchandise. If you’ve yet to purchase a Switch 2 or even the original Switch, neither console is any cheaper on Nintendo’s website.

That said, with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X only going up in price at the moment, we should be glad that Nintendo and Valve haven’t followed suit (yet).

Is the Steam Deck for me?

Although the Steam Deck looks like a Switch, and is now priced like one, there are some major differences. For a start, it doesn’t have removeable Joy-Cons or, obviously, any Nintendo games, but it can play the majority of PC games from Steam.

Not everything works, and some work but with issues, but most new games are made with the console in mind and try to make it as compatible as possible.

The biggest problem is with games that make a lot of use of the keyboard and mouse, although the Switch Deck tries to compensate for this with its twin touchpads and virtual keyboard.

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