Valve lets slip plan to sell refurbished Steam Decks
Valve may start selling officially refurbished Steam Decks in the future, according to new data found in the Steam database. Listings marked «Certified Refurbished» have appeared for all three models of Steam Deck—64GB, 256GB, and 512GB—and there are even preliminary prices for an idea of how much you might have to pay to snap one up.
These models were added yesterday, August 7. The store names swiftly changed to the more generic «Unknown App» shortly thereafter, the descriptions were removed, and the store pages redirected to the store front. Yet the entries had already been logged—the cat was well and truly out of the bag.
The three models are as follows, as spotted by Pavel Djundik, creator of SteamDB:
Those discount prices aren't final, though they look pretty familiar: they're the price you could've picked up a Steam Deck during the recent sales. If these are to be the prices of officially refurbished Steam Decks, it might be worth waiting until a major Steam sale event just to see if you can't nab a new one for the same money.
Valve could decide against refurbished Steam Decks even now, but it appears very likely that the company plans to offer rebuilt units of its own.
It's a good idea, at least. Valve has spare parts and can probably make fairly easy work of fixing whatever is broken on any specific Deck. Meanwhile anything that makes the Steam Deck cheaper for us is appreciated. The important thing will be whether there's still the same sort of warranty on these devices as there would be on a brand new unit.
Valve has been pretty good with offering spare parts for large chunks of the Steam Deck via iFixit, and it's not too difficult to pry apart and replace some parts—check out my TikTok videos on how to
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