Scratch that, the Steam Machine is delayed after all – and Valve confirm RAM shortages will affect pricing

Despite AMD’s assurances to the contrary, Valve have announced that they’ve pushed back release plans for the new Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame VR headset. Alas, my curse of publishing news posts roughly 0.0045 seconds before a major situation change continues to ruin my life – sometimes I wish I’d never beaten the warlocks in that Titanfall 2 pub match.

Instead of “early 2026,” the original release window, Valve are now only aiming to ship the hardware trio “in the first half of the year.” No prizes for guessing the cause, either: the Steam blog post notes specifically that ongoing memory and SSD shortages, caused by the tech industry buying up components to build infrastructure for AI products, have both scuppered the initial launch plans and delayed Valve’s decision on how the Steam Machine and its brethren will be priced.

“When we announced these products in November,” the post reads, “we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you’ve likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then.The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame).

“Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed. But we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change. We will keep you updated as much as we can as we finalize those plans as soon as possible.”

If the Machine, Controller, and Frame do arrive in the first half of 2026, that ultimately wouldn’t be an interminable wait beyond the originally announced window. Higher-than-expected prices seem like a given, though, particularly for the Machine and the Frame. The Steam Controller might at least dodge the blow of the economics hammer, as it contains neither a fat SSD nor a pile of RAM.

For now, all we can do is bitterly add “Hopes of a cheap living room PC” to the list of all the things that the AI uranium rush has destroyed, alongside general component pricing, Crucial, and game developers’ opinions of AI.