Looks like arsTechnica mastered the clickbait. The title is misleading, the first sentence contradicts it, the claim is false (there is stock), and even if it weren't it's irrelevant without knowing inventory size. I can think of 0 positive things going for this article.

No? The website has units available here[0] in the US. I think this article is old. There must have been a very small first shipment that got sold out before the next batch came in

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck

No-one knows how many they had in stock. It might have been 6.

> Note: Steam Deck OLED may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.

Misleading article

"Sold out" is mostly meaningless if we don't know the inventory they moved. Perhaps 5,000 units have rolled off the line over the last week and those all sold. Or maybe 200,000 sold out in one day. We simply don't know what it means to sell out.

My guess is they could sell low double digit thousands per month, in which case selling out temporarily in some regions is an entirely meaningless measure hardly worth an article or even a tweet.

TL;DR: Scalpers doing scalper things.