4 ms·

I wonder if these RAM shortages are going to cause the Steam Machine to be dead on arrival. Valve is probably not a big enough player to have secured production

I wonder if these RAM shortages are going to cause the Steam Machine to be dead on arrival. Valve is probably not a big enough player to have secured production guarantees like Sony or Nintendo would have. If they try to launch with a price tag over $750, they're probably not going sell a lot.

pja 10mo ago
Yeah, I think (sadly) this kills the Steam Machine in the short term if the competition is current consoles. At least until the supply contracts Sony & Microsoft have signed come up for renewal, at which point they’re going to be getting the short end of the RAM stick too. In the short term the RAM shortage is going to kill homebrew PC building & small PC builders stone dead - prebuilts from the larger suppliers will be able to outcompete them on price so much that it simply won’t make any sense to buy from anyone except HP, Dell etc etc. Again, this applies only until the supply contracts those big PC firms have signed run out, or possibly only until their suppliers find they can’t source DDR5 ram chips for love nor money, because the fabs are only making HBM chips & so they have to break the contracts themselves. It’s going to get bumpy.
- fullstop 10mo ago
  > At least until the supply contracts Sony & Microsoft have signed come up for renewal, at which point they’re going to be getting the short end of the RAM stick too. Allegedly Sony has an agreement for a number of years, but Microsoft does not: https://thegamepost.com/leaker-xbox-series-prices-increase-ram-shortages-microsoft-soon/ https://thegamepost.com/leaker-xbox-series-prices-increase-r...
  - pja 10mo ago
    Eesh. The fight over RAM supply is going to upend a lot of product markets. Just random happenstance over whether a company decided to lock in supply for a couple of years is going to make or break individual products.
delfinom 10mo ago
If anyone that has hidden cash reserves that could buy out even Apple. It would probably be Valve. Lol, wacky reality if they say "hey we had spare cash so we bought out Micron to get DDR5 for our gaming systems"
- quesera 10mo ago
  To save my fellow ignorami some math, Valve is estimated to be valued at approximately 3.2% of Micron, or 0.2% of Apple. :)
  - ActorNightly 10mo ago
    Value =/= cash reserves. Valve has ran VERY lean for quite some time.
    - quesera 10mo ago
      Sure, but valuation should always exceed cash reserves. It's very odd when it does not. I think I recall that that SUNW (by then JAVA probably) was at one point valued below cash, prior to ORCL acquisition. If Valve's secrecy is so good that they have (substantially more than) 30-500x cash stashed away in excess of their public valuation estimates, then perhaps I underestimate Valve's secrecy! More likely, it was an obviously-humorous exaggeration, but I wasn't sure -- I am quite ignorant of the games industry. :)
      - fullstop 10mo ago
        They're not publicly traded, so we really don't know.
- quickthrowman 10mo ago
  Valve is worth maybe 0.1% (single digit billions is what I’d guess) of Apple, which made $112B in net income in 2025. That’s profit, not revenue. Apple could probably buy Valve for 30 days of its net income, which is around $9.3B ($306M per day in profit, including weekends) There’s zero chance that Gaben has squirreled away Four Trillion Dollars in cash.
jeroenhd 10mo ago
Valve has already commented informally that Steam Machines will be priced on par with gaming PCs of similar hardware specs. They won't be able to defeat console makers on the short term, but PC gamers will be paying the same price, so for those the value proposition remains unchanged.
seanw444 10mo ago
Or Valve draws from their deep pockets to sell them at a loss in the short term to gain product loyalty in the long term.
arvinsim 10mo ago
That's true. But then if you are building a PC, prices are going up anyway so maybe in that comparision the Steam Machine is still worth getting.

pja 10mo ago

Yeah, I think (sadly) this kills the Steam Machine in the short term if the competition is current consoles. At least until the supply contracts Sony & Microsoft have signed come up for renewal, at which point they’re going to be getting the short end of the RAM stick too. In the short term the RAM shortage is going to kill homebrew PC building & small PC builders stone dead - prebuilts from the larger suppliers will be able to outcompete them on price so much that it simply won’t make any sense to buy from anyone except HP, Dell etc etc. Again, this applies only until the supply contracts those big PC firms have signed run out, or possibly only until their suppliers find they can’t source DDR5 ram chips for love nor money, because the fabs are only making HBM chips & so they have to break the contracts themselves. It’s going to get bumpy.

fullstop 10mo ago
> At least until the supply contracts Sony & Microsoft have signed come up for renewal, at which point they’re going to be getting the short end of the RAM stick too. Allegedly Sony has an agreement for a number of years, but Microsoft does not: https://thegamepost.com/leaker-xbox-series-prices-increase-ram-shortages-microsoft-soon/ https://thegamepost.com/leaker-xbox-series-prices-increase-r...
- pja 10mo ago
  Eesh. The fight over RAM supply is going to upend a lot of product markets. Just random happenstance over whether a company decided to lock in supply for a couple of years is going to make or break individual products.

delfinom 10mo ago

If anyone that has hidden cash reserves that could buy out even Apple. It would probably be Valve. Lol, wacky reality if they say "hey we had spare cash so we bought out Micron to get DDR5 for our gaming systems"

quesera 10mo ago
To save my fellow ignorami some math, Valve is estimated to be valued at approximately 3.2% of Micron, or 0.2% of Apple. :)
- ActorNightly 10mo ago
  Value =/= cash reserves. Valve has ran VERY lean for quite some time.
  - quesera 10mo ago
    Sure, but valuation should always exceed cash reserves. It's very odd when it does not. I think I recall that that SUNW (by then JAVA probably) was at one point valued below cash, prior to ORCL acquisition. If Valve's secrecy is so good that they have (substantially more than) 30-500x cash stashed away in excess of their public valuation estimates, then perhaps I underestimate Valve's secrecy! More likely, it was an obviously-humorous exaggeration, but I wasn't sure -- I am quite ignorant of the games industry. :)
    - fullstop 10mo ago
      They're not publicly traded, so we really don't know.
quickthrowman 10mo ago
Valve is worth maybe 0.1% (single digit billions is what I’d guess) of Apple, which made $112B in net income in 2025. That’s profit, not revenue. Apple could probably buy Valve for 30 days of its net income, which is around $9.3B ($306M per day in profit, including weekends) There’s zero chance that Gaben has squirreled away Four Trillion Dollars in cash.

jeroenhd 10mo ago

Valve has already commented informally that Steam Machines will be priced on par with gaming PCs of similar hardware specs. They won't be able to defeat console makers on the short term, but PC gamers will be paying the same price, so for those the value proposition remains unchanged.

seanw444 10mo ago

Or Valve draws from their deep pockets to sell them at a loss in the short term to gain product loyalty in the long term.

arvinsim 10mo ago

That's true. But then if you are building a PC, prices are going up anyway so maybe in that comparision the Steam Machine is still worth getting.