Well, that answers that. The new Steam Machine, which Valve have just opened to randomised reservations, starts at £879 / $1049 / €1039 for the base 512GB model, and costs £1149 / $1349 / €1359 for the 2TB version – climbing to £1208 / $1428 / €1428 if you bundle in a Steam Controller.
To paraphrase my Steam Machine review stance on those prices: they’re pretty chuffing high, even if the Machine itself is a nicely designed (and unusually specialised) piece of lower-end kit. As for what Valve themselves think, I asked designer Lawrence Yang and engineer Yazan Aldehayyat ahead of today’s sort-of-launch, both of them pointing to the ongoing component pricing/availability hellscape that is RAMnarök.
“The big, number one factor in cost is the components that make up the device, and you know, the cost of making it and shipping it and distributing it, etc. etc.,” says Aldehayyat. “I mean, as we said before, I think we really wanted the Steam Machine to be a good entry-level PC. I think we mentioned that in November, and we want it to be affordable for as many people as possible. It’s definitely more expensive than we hoped.”
All the same, Aldehayyat feels that the Steam Machine can tango with other (prepare for the heaviest-lifting apostrophes in online media history) ‘budget’ gaming PCs. Which, in fairness, are subject to the same shortages-induced inflation as Valve’s black box. “We understand that it’s probably not as affordable as… like, some people are going to be priced out,” he concedes. “But we still think that even at the price point, comparing it to what’s available on the market, it’s still a good value, and for a lot of people, is going to be a really good experience.”
It’s sentiment that mirrors a blog post Valve published in tandem with the price and reservation reveal, which spells out the impact of the industry-wide parts fuckery on the Steam Machine, as well as how it wrong-footed the Steam custodians’ expectations.
To quote said post: “Steam Machine, like our other hardware products, is made up of many components that we source from manufacturers around the world. The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023. That understanding was born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices – primarily, that it tends to get cheaper over time as new technology arrives.
“Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we’re sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we’ve secured them over the past 6 months.”
Even among Valve hardware, the Steam Machine isn’t alone in its suffering: the Steam Deck OLED, previously a champion of affordable PC play, was recently slapped with price hikes of up to 46%. While it’s still cheaper than a lot of its handheld rivals, ballooned entry fees do undermine its position as a strong budget option – a conundrum that the newer device must navigate as well. What would it take, in the future, for the Steam Machine’s price to drop in the opposite direction?
“It’s… it’s too dangerous for us to speculate right now,” Aldehayyat replies. “I would say, like, anything we say now is probably gonna be unfortunate statements in the future, but I think we just have to wait and see what the market does, because I don’t think anybody right now is able to predict what’s going to happen in the future, so we’d like to refrain from trying to make predictions that are difficult to make right now.”
“Suffice to say,” Yang adds, “at least at this moment, component prices are too high, and components themselves are too rare, to make what we want, at the price that we want, when we want to. And I think it’s something that’s shared by everyone in this industry right now.”
Speaking of unfortunate statements, looking back at that November post about predicting the Steam Machine’s price, it turns out my specs-based calculation was only £10 off the final 512GB tag. Only, I spent most of that post denying the utility of predictions and rubbishing the method I used to make it. So I can’t even gloat. God, these shortages really are rubbish.
