Ah yes, the Handheld Gaming PC market. I’ve mentioned this before, but this market, it wasn’t created by Valve, but might as well have been, considering its success. No, we need to go a bit further back.

This market in its current state was essentially created by GamePad Digital, famously known as GPD, when they created the GPD Win, released in 2016. The idea was to make a small form factor PC that you could play games with.

As you can see, it looked pretty awkward (especially to hold!). But it predates the Switch by a few months, considering its release date.

The price of the GPD Win was 330 USD, which would be about 444 USD in 2025. Not bad. Until you look at the specs, of course. This thing runs an Intel Atom CPU, has 4 GB of DDR3 and 64GB eMMC flash memory. Specs that at the time weren’t that advanced, but remember, this thing also predates AMD’s Ryzen and RDNA lineups.

Overall, it’s pretty nice for a first time product, but a bit weak.

Today, however, there’s so many models that it’ll make your head spin. Liliputing has made an admirable job to keep up with this.

And I feel there’s a bigger problem related to this market that these companies simply don’t understand.

Eat the Cost, Sell A Lot

Do you know why Nintendo makes consoles? Because that’s primarily their business. But that also means that if Nintendo makes a bad console that happens to not sell well, they lose a lot of money. So the idea is to make sure that not only the console is as cheap as they could make it so they turn a profit, but also desirably strong enough that customers want to buy it. It’s a balancing act.

And if they predict they’ll sell plenty of consoles, they allow themselves to lose some money at the start, eating the cost of the production to make sure that once the production gets cheaper, they can make money from it. That’s not even counting the games, since we’re only talking about the physical part of the equation, the hardware.

For PCs and similarly related things (laptops), things work a bit differently. Companies that make prebuilts for PC go through deals that happen to be similar to retail channels. Similarly to laptops, companies buy the CPU or GPU and design the rest by themselves. Because of that, the pricing is a little different because you can order in bulk and said CPU or GPU maker will make whatever they think on it. Semi-custom designs go to a similar process, but the different is that the deal is done at the start of the production rather at the end.

All of that to say that retail channels and deals made in bulk make the total cost of the hardware more expensive. But that’s where the trap lies into.

Customers don’t care about that. The very first (or last, to confirm it) thing they see on a product is its price tag. And it’s too high, they won’t buy it. A system that is completely overkill but costs 4 times the competition is gonna get ignored by 90% of the possible users.

The other 10% will certainly buy it because people have a niche to be filled so it’s important that the market is elastic enough to meet their criteria. The problem lies when the entire market becomes lousy with the pricing that it doesn’t matter anymore.

These Have the Wrong Pricing

I’m gonna give out some examples.

The ONEXPLAYER 2 Pro launched in 2024. Pricing started at 1059 USD.

The AYANEO 3 launched in April 2025. Pricing for the actual current gen specs version started at 1299 USD.

The GPD Win 4 with current gen specs launched December 2024. Pricing started at 1157 USD.

See what I mean? All of these cost over 1000 USD, in current day pricing.

Compare to the Steam Deck, which starts at 400 USD, and tops out at 650 USD.

Now imagine being at a store, and looking at 400 USD Steam Deck and a 1300 USD AYANEO 3. What would youget? Is the AYANEO 3’s performance good enough that it’s the equivalent of buying 3 Steam Decks? I don’t think so.

The new ASUS ROG Xbox Ally had its pricing leaked, 549 and 899, both in USD. Not too bad, but still in the range of being uncomfortable. Sure, it’s gonna be powerful, but the pricing still sucks, considering that you could buy 2 Steam Decks at their lowest pricing compared to one ROG Xbox Ally X at its highest.

Decking Its Way to Victory

Valve’s Steam Deck remains the standard handheld gaming PC console thingy to beat. With the entry price being 400 USD, it’s vastly superior to the lower spec models that cost a lot less, and it’s much cheaper than higher priced, higher spec models that exist out there. AYANEO and a few others predate Valve, sure, but their models did not have the ecosystem that Valve had built, so Valve can afford to eat the cost and sell a lot of units (see the previous paragraph). According to market researching firm IDC, they predicted that in 3 years, Valve sold over 3.7 million units of their console, this number being 50% of the market. Even worse is that IDC doesn’t count the various Chinese handheld brands, probably because they don’t sell even in the thousands of units.

And that’s what is missing from these companies. They don’t eat the cost because they don’t have an ecosystem to make it a reality, which is a huge problem for them, as they keep making devices cost more than the previous. This cost is then passed on to the customer, that has to deal with over 700 USD craziness of prices. The average retail price of the Chinese-branded handheld PCs are in the thousands. You could get a pretty sweet PC desktop build, or even a few consoles for that.

A Crazy Amount of Uncertainty

My final bit of discussion is one that I feel it’s a bit pertinent to the topic as a whole, but the companies making these PC handhelds don’t seem to commit fully to it, and that makes this market funnel more into options that are guaranteed to work.

Lenovo has announced the new Legion Go 2 with a nice price tag of… 1099 USD.

AYN has dropped selling their own PC handhelds, selling the rest of the stock to a brazilian company called TecToy, who is selling the AYN Loki as the ‘TecToy Zeenix”. Shows a lack of commitment.

AYANEO keeps making the PC handheld equivalent of slop, with models released every year, with different specs every time. Now they are working on a bunch of ARM powered devices, and even a gaming phone. No price or availability timeframe.

ASUS partnered with Microsoft to make the ROG Xbox Ally, which isn’t a Xbox console, but a PC handheld. Pricing hasn’t been announced despite the fact that the regions it’ll sell have been. Are they scared of shocking people with the 549/899USD price tag?

Zotac announced the Zone, a Steam Deck copy (even with touchpads!), in 2024, but you couldn’t buy one. And people did try, which was very strange. This year, they announced and showed off the Zone Pro, but this new version hasn’t been seen since the showing. No price or availability timeframe.

MSI used Intel CPUs for their PC handheld Claw, and it was both bad in performance and in pricing, meaning no one bought it. Some of the new Claw AI (sigh) models come with AMD chips and they are much better, but these have been essentially in a roll out stage that makes turtles feel faster. Availability has been very very spotty but prices are in the 800 to 900 pounds range, as the MSI UK has revealed preorders.

All of these examples just show that some of these companies decided to make this because of Valve’s success but found themselves not selling well or at all, causing their investment to backfire the worst way possible, so they have to diversify or they’ll have to cancel everything.

Closing Words

Prices are too high. Specs are too crazy. And they don’t sell as well. I wonder what’s the problem, right?

Valve seemed to find the best way to tackle this market, think of it as a console that is a bit open than the usual thing than just taking the guts of a laptop and putting in a controller with a screen in the middle and call it a day. And everyone appears to be stumped on why they don’t have the same amount of success. Well, I wonder why too.

Ultimately once Valve ships out the Steam Deck 2 with powerful hardware or something akin to it, it’ll rejuvenate the market again, and we’ll go through the same issues as companies fail to understand what makes things successful, good price and decent compromises.

_{Update 1: Corrected some statements, and the leaked price of the Xbox Ally, 549 USD, not 559 USD.}

_{Update 2: Corrected more statements, added the price of the Legion Go 2 and changed the name of the Zotac Zone 2 to Zone Pro.}