There is no end seemingly in sight for the memory crisis, or of how much higher the price of consumer electronics could go. Valve, which recently shipped its expensive Steam Machine, has learned this the hard way.
The result was a Steam Machine that costs £879 ($1,049) at minimum – a price Valve admitted was well above what it originally wanted. But things aren’t getting any better; unfortunately, current component prices are even more expensive than when Valve shipped in that initial wave of Steam Machines.
“Honestly, it’s still getting worse,” Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat recently told Bloomberg. “Just in case people are not aware. What people are seeing on retail shelves right now, from our observations, is lagging what we’re seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months.”
While Aldehayyat didn’t outright say it, this does suggest a price increase is on the horizon. This could also affect Steam Deck, of course, and consoles like the PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo Switch.
Indeed, these comments line up with Microsoft’s own statements about the state of RAM and storage prices – the components that are at the vanguard of the AI datacenter-driven shortages. Microsoft announced it was significantly raising the price of the entire Xbox Series X/S line-up, effective 1st August. And as part of the same announcement, Microsoft said it expects component prices to double again by the autumn of 2027, perhaps preparing players for another round of price hikes.
This isn’t the first time Microsoft has raised the price of Xbox consoles. Sony, too, has increased PS5 prices several times, and Nintendo announced a Switch 2 price hike to take effect 1st September.
So where does this leave us? The Valve engineer is hopeful that pricing will eventually fix itself. Either that or, if the crisis continues, this will simply be the kind of pricing we can expect consumer electronics to have.
