The price of the Steam Machine is “significantly more” than Valve would have liked to launch it at, Valve has told Eurogamer, and it hasn’t been able to make as many units of the new console-like PC as it wanted to, either.
Valve made these comments to me in an interview ahead of Steam Machine’s price announcement and sort-of release date today. The big takeaway is that even the cheapest storage configuration of the Steam Machine is more than 1,000 dollars – £879 here – and if you buy it with a Steam Controller, similar to how you’d buy a console with a controller, it’s £938.
Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro, by comparison – the most expensive console and one that’s more powerful than the Steam Machine – is priced £790. We are a long way from the ‘$400 with a controller’ proposition people were speculating about when Valve’s Steam Machine was announced last November.
The reason for the high price is the ongoing component shortage crisis caused by AI datacentre component demand. Indeed, as if predicting an explanation was required, Valve’s Steam Machine announcement dived straight into this exact issue after the price was revealed, stating, “Our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable”.
Valve wouldn’t tell me what that original price was but engineer Yazan Aldehayyat did say the price is now “significantly more.” He added: “It’s hard because I don’t think we ever really had an official price or anything like that – I think we had some ideas – but it’s really difficult to quantify it.”
“We were aware of the market trends of pricing going up, but I don’t think anybody really expected or predicted the extent to which they were going up and [are] still going up” -Yazan Aldehayyat
At this point Lawrence Yang, a user interface designer for Steam Machine (and Steam Deck and HTC Vive before it), interjected to say that Steam Deck was a good comparison for the price Valve was considering. Aldehayyat agreed and said: “That’s sort of a rough estimate of what that would have been.”
For reference, the 512GB OLED Steam Deck costs £649, and the 1TB OLED Steam Deck costs £779. By contrast, the 512GB Steam Machine costs £879, and while there isn’t a 1TB option, the 2TB Steam Machine costs £1,149.
In Valve’s blog post, the company said it started sourcing components for Steam Machine in 2023, before the component crisis took hold. However, its assumption back then was that prices would fall – an “understanding born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices”. But obviously that’s not what happened. In other words, Valve left it too late.
But how aware was Valve of the component pricing problem when it announced the Steam Machine in November? Memory and storage issues were a clear issue then: we’d seen multiple price rises for consoles already that year, along with lots of tariff-related problems. It was a big enough factor that I wrote a report about it, with a selection of experts telling me “the role of the console is shifting”.
“I think we were aware of the market trends of pricing going up,” Valve’s Aldehayyat said in response, “but I don’t think anybody really expected or predicted the extent to which they were going up and [are] still going up.
“It wasn’t a matter of predicting or not predicting whether the market was going up, it’s really about trying to figure out how much will it go up by, and I would say that I don’t think anybody really saw the extent in which things have gone up by – definitely not when we started working on it, definitely not by November. Nobody expected it – unless you work at Samsung or Hynix or something. It’s just way more than anybody really expected it to be.”
The other knock-on effect of scarcity of components is quantity. As Valve’s blog noted, the availability and launch quantity are also impacted by this. Hence it not having an ‘It’s available now – come get it!’ release date, but rather a veiled rollout whereby Valve will begin dispatching Steam Machines from 29th June. How many are available to send out, we don’t know.
“I don’t think we’re going to be sharing numbers today,” Lawrence Yang told me when I asked. “But I’ll definitely say it’s less than we wanted to be able to make, and it’s a combination of both the price of components and what would make sense, but also availability of components. Some things are just not available or have a ridiculously large lead time.” Those things, in case you’re wondering, are RAM and storage.
Aldehayyat added: “Our sourcing team is working night and day to get as many parts as possible. I think they’re doing a great job, and we’re continually improving supply – there’s a lot of improvements on that front – so we’re doing our best to get as many units in people’s hands who want them as possible. We’re hoping things will improve as the year goes on, so we don’t want to discourage people.
“We were definitely hoping to make it more affordable for more people, but even at this price-point, we still think it’s a good value, still commensurate with other similar devices” -Yazan Aldehayyat
“We’re building as fast as we can and they’re being brought over to us as fast as we can. I don’t remember the exact cadence, but there’s going to be more and more units arriving as the year goes on. And as I said before, we’re still working to improve supply, and so as we get more reservations, we will definitely try to make more and more.”
But one of the things Valve doesn’t know right now is what the demand will be. It doesn’t know how much the inflated price will impact the appeal of the new Steam Machine. Is the price too high to tempt people? Will people try to build their own PCs instead? Or will they settle or stick with a console? These are unknowns until actual Steam Machine orders start coming in.
“I’m very curious to see how people react to the price,” Yang said. “We’re in a different time now than we were a few months ago. I feel like [awareness of the component shortage] has seeped into the general consciousness, at least of people who are following hardware. All the prices are going up, things are going out of stock, something’s happening to the point where everyone is impacted by it. So I’m guessing that people – or hoping that people – will understand.
“And then for some people, the price proposition might not be right for them, and that’s totally fine. It is more expensive than we wanted it to be, for sure. But we think that compared to what you could build with the same price, it is kind of commensurate, and we think that we’re bringing something extra with the small form factor and all of the other stuff that we built into it.”
Aldehayyat added: “Even at the price, it’s still competitive with similarly specced machines, especially pre-built machines. But obviously we always want our hardware devices to be as affordable as possible, because we really want to bring in as many people as possible into the gaming ecosystem, especially people who are very price sensitive. We were definitely hoping to make it more affordable for more people, but even at this price-point, we still think it’s a good value, still commensurate with other similar devices.”
Valve’s Steam Machine is a small cube-shaped PC, roughly the dimensions of a PC fan squared, so to speak – it’s a dinky little thing. And a lot of attention has been paid to making it work like a console, to be plug-and-play in the same way, so there’s more engineering here than just fitting a PC into a small box and making sure it’s quiet and well-cooled. Nevertheless, it’s expensive for the performance it offers, which is broadly equivalent to a PS5 – we have a Steam Machine tech Q&A specifically about this.
Is, then, the allure of having Steam’s enormous gaming catalogue in your living room, and the relative freedom of a PC, enough to convince people to shell out several hundred pounds for a Steam Machine? That’s the big question – and one Chris set about answering in his Steam Machine review after several days playing with it. You can find out everything we know about Steam Machine – the specs, the price, how you can buy one – elsewhere on the site.
