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The Steam Controller is the first of Valve’s 2026 hardware triumvirate to see the light of day, with the pad launching on May 4 this year. We’ve had our hands on the new controller, and have been really impressed with it, but it’s hard not to think about the hardware that was revealed alongside it: the Steam Machine.
That’s been delayed from its original early 2026 release, and we still don’t know when we’ll have the little TV companion cube actually launch—though recent imports and rumours suggest it might not be long. But as we were chatting with Valve’s Steve Cardinali and Lawrence Yang around the review of the Steam Controller, we also wanted to talk about the other hardware and what it felt like inside Valve having to hold it back.
“I mean, obviously we’re bummed that this is the state of things,” Lawrence Yang tells us. “At the very least, we’re not the only ones in this boat. Like everyone’s kind of figuring out how to overcome these obstacles and challenges—RAM shortages, memory shortages, price hikes, everything.
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“You know, it’s unavoidable that it will impact basically anything we make that has any of those parts in them. So we’re doing our best to make sure that we can make the product and have it still available at as good and competitive a price as we can. But yeah, it’s challenging for sure.”
The reveal of the Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame happened in November last year, to a huge amount of hype. And the most hyped of all was the Steam Machine… and then even before the end of the year, the market started losing it over AI demand, and prices began to skyrocket.
Cut to early February and Valve has to admit it cannot give any clear signal over either pricing or a release date for its mini PC because of “limited availability and growing prices” of memory and storage components.
“Yeah, I mean, no engineer who designs a product wants to… you’re like right there and then you have this whole challenge thrown at you last minute,” says Cardinali. “It’s frustrating. But yeah, we’re working our hardest to get resolution there.”
But Yang notes Valve knew pretty early on that it would be shipping the Steam Controller ahead of everything else, and there was never a thought to just hold the pad back so it could come out at least with the Steam Machine.
“While they share a lot of the same DNA, and we did announce them all at the same time,” he says, “we knew that there was some chance that schedules would move and we would just ship them when they were ready. We knew that definitely we’d want to ship Steam Controller before, or with Steam Machine. Steam Machine without Steam Controller at all makes a little less sense.
“Earlier on this year we knew that Steam Controller would probably be coming out first. So there was no real desire or need to artificially make them ship simultaneously because then that would just push everything else out.”
That’s not to say Valve wasn’t aware of what was being said out in the wider PC gaming community: “We saw a few rumors circulating that maybe they’re holding Steam Controller back so that other things can be shipped around the same time,” says Yang.
“That’s not the case. We’re shipping Steam Controller when we can. And this is now when we can. And part of it is making sure the product is ready, the firmware is finalized, and making sure that we have enough stock in warehouses to have a good launch quantity.”
“That’s a big one,” chimes in Cardinali. “We wanted to make sure we had a lot on hand, because we do anticipate high demand, but it could always exceed our expectations as well.”
And I think he might be right about that, yet while Valve is positive it has enough stock, I still think it’s going to be out of stock on day one. Not long to find out.
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