Ultra-Rare Steam Deck Prototype With Vega GPU Fetches $2K On Ebay

An engineering sample of Valve's Steam Deck handheld appears to have sold on eBay for $2,000 (it was listed for $2,999.99), plus another $5 shipping. So $2,005 total, if our math checks out. That's three times higher than Valve's most expensive Steam Deck model, the OLED variant with 1TB of storage ($649) and seven and around five times more than its cheapest SKU, the LCD model with 256GB of storage ($399). Why did it command so much?

The main reason is that it's a rare piece of history. Even though Valve went through dozens of designs before finalizing the Steam Deck for retail, you don't see a lot of prototypes in the wild. And at least in this case, there's a badge on the back that clearly indicates, "Engineering sample 34, not for resale."

Reddit user Gary_the_mememachine spotted the listing ...