You can now buy a refurbished Steam Deck straight from Valve — if it’s in stock

Have you wanted to buy a Steam Deck, but aren’t sure about the price? The $399 LCD model is the least expensive, but it’s worth a little extra for the Steam Deck OLED, which offers double or even quadruple the onboard memory. Good news: You can now buy a refurbished Steam Deck directly from Valve. Fair warning: These are selling like hotcakes on the coldest day of the year. At the time of writing, you could pick up a 512GB Steam Deck OLED for just $439, or a 1TB version for $519. So what does refurbished mean, exactly? According to Steam, the units are put through all the same tests as brand-new retail units, and each Steam Deck receives a factory reset, software update, and thorough examination. All of the different systems are checked and tested, including the battery. In fact, it’s possible to get a potentially improved Steam Deck when buying refurbished, as Valve says “all refurbished units meet or even exceed the performance standards of new retail units.” That said, the Steam Decks could come with a few scratches or scuffs, but the damage is purely cosmetic. All refurbished units come with the same one-year warranty as a new one, a refurbished power supply, and the carrying case and quick-start guide. Valve’s refurbished offers are here just in time for the holidays, with an estimated delivery time of three to five business days. It’s not a bad price when you can pick up a much higher-end unit for just slightly more than the base model. The Steam Deck has a lot to offer, especially if you’d like to take your favorite PC games with you on the go (it can run non-Steam games, too). It also supports mods, so you can take that 24-mod Stardew Valley save that you’ve been working toward and play it on the train. A modder named SnooOranges3876 has released a plugin for Steam Deck titles that lets players adjust graphics on the fly, improving appearance and performance, and the best part is that it’s both free and easy to use. Called LetMeReShade, this plugin allows players to adjust illumination, contrast, colors, and much more on the fly. It can be particularly beneficial to older titles, too. The plugin is available through GitHub. It circumvents the often-complicated install processes for ReShade mods and instead lets players quickly apply those mods to games. In the example video, SnooOranges3876 is seen changing shaders in Cyberpunk 2077 and Heavy Rain, with several other titles like Alan Wake and Monster Sanctuary as potential options. I have a massive Steam library, and like most PC gamers I know, I’m always looking to add to it. Will I actually play the games? Maybe. Will I complete all of them? Certainly not. But I’m caught in a negative feedback loop of picking up new games constantly for pennies on the dollar, and Steam is feeding my addiction more than ever before. How? With Steam bundles. Steam bundles aren’t anything new, but I’ve seen a stark uptick in them over the last several months. They mostly revolve around similarly styled indie titles, offering a small discount of around 10% if you buy two or three games in bulk. That’s not why I’ve taken advantage of Steam bundles so often over the past several months, though.
The hack The Steam Deck Verified program was a good start, but it’s time to move on. Valve separates compatibility with the Steam Deck into four buckets. You have Verified games, which have a green check mark for Valve’s seal of approval, and you have Playable games, which would normally get a Verified badge had it not been for some small issues (i.e. small text or invoking the on-screen keyboard). Those are the two categories you gravitate toward.