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> 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

> 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. Take notes about the tone, the communication style, the honesty that you can feel by reading those words. There are no problem that can’t be alleviated (if not solved) with good communication to your customer, and you can bet that Steam knows damn well theirs!

giancarlostoro 4mo ago
I have a feeling it would have cost drastically less if we didn't have a RAM / storage crisis, which is really sad.
- NothingAboutAny 4mo ago
  there's probably ~$150 in the ram and ~$100 in the SSD alone, not to mention everything else. we gotta have data-centers though because, uh.. well, we gotta have em.
  - dannyw 4mo ago
    To a large extent, all these datacenters are being built because people want tokens. Do you use something like Opus or GPT5.5 for coding? Well, you're part of the demand. If you don't, then yes, as a PC enthusiast I'm sad as well. But like, it's a little bit ironic to be complaining about RAM prices if you've got 5 sub-agents hacking away.
    - Dylan16807 4mo ago
      If someone is using heavily underpriced tokens I don't blame them much either. They're not funding the hardware purchases, super-investors that want to control the AI world are.
- starkrights 4mo ago
  I’ve seen from a couple of places that a valver has commented that they can’t say exactly what the original price goal was, but that you can get an idea from the price increase of the steamdeck (~$200 usd) That wouldve put the steam machine somewhere around the $800 mark for the base edition, which would’ve been so, so much sweeter of a value proposition.
  - frollogaston 4mo ago
    I feel bad for them running into this shortage right before launch. Steam Machine was announced before all this.
- shantara 4mo ago
  The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation, which would have changed the equation drastically. I even considered getting it as a mostly streaming box for a living room, intending to play only the lighter games on device. But for the announced price and after delays, it just doesn't make sense financially. As is, you're grossly overpaying for the level of GPU performance Steam Machine offers.
  - joe_mamba 4mo ago
    >The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation Also on a 2025 launch, but that 2023 mid-level hardware feels already pretty weak in 2026, especially for a console you're supposed to run 6-7 years into the future. Sure, it's as powerful as a base PS5 but that console is already 6 years old by now. So the valve box is a pain to justify jumping in unless you're a big valve fan and don't want to DIY a PC.
    - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
      What's most surprising is the benchmarks dont look too hot vs the PS5... which doesn't cost nearly as much.
      - mywittyname 4mo ago
        Sony are masters of optimizations. Some of their PC ports run really well on the Steam Deck.
Gigachad 4mo ago
Valve's communication around this release has redirected all rage towards Sam Altman rather than the Steam Machine.
- bigyabai 4mo ago
  The "rage" is largely surrounding the price, not the Machine hardware itself. The Deck sold like hotcakes at $400. We'll see actual outrage when the masses defer new smartphone upgrades due to price bumps.
  - TomK32 4mo ago
    I'm pretty sure they would have loved to put a better GPU chip in but that would have cost too much extra in these mad days.
  - redsocksfan45 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - Sharlin 4mo ago
    If there's anything good to be found about the Ramageddon, it's that people will hopefully keep using their perfectly good phones and other hardware a bit longer between upgrades.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
  That's the beauty of the "There are a variety of reasons" part, whatever you believe to be the reason, Valve seems to agree with you, biases or not.
  - Gigachad 4mo ago
    The variety of reasons being Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc. We all know why hardware has become unaffordable even if Valve hasn't spelled it out.
    - 4mo ago
juleiie 4mo ago
I love it I won’t buy it But wow what a nice communication That’s gonna look great on post mortem report
cubefox 4mo ago
> There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. I'm pretty sure the price increase is exclusively caused by LLMs.
Forgeties79 4mo ago
I totally get where they’re coming from but sadly it doesn’t change the fact that $1100+ is a tough sell for the benchmarks they’re hitting.
- port11 4mo ago
  Given the price of components right now, I don’t know. 1k for that small of a form factor seems acceptable. It’s a nice addition to the living room, could likely play a role in cancelling expensive video streaming subscriptions. Might also run some local LLMs. Seems decent.
  - Forgeties79 4mo ago
    I love my steam deck and I just don’t see this working, but time will tell. If they sell 2-3mill units I’d consider that a wild success and that i was dead wrong. really hope I am. Steam machine will really change the game if it success
- elxr 4mo ago
  They know it's a tough sell. Fortunately for everyone in the market, you can still find used CPUs/GPUs/RAM pretty easily and save a decent amount if you're ok with building your own. Valve doesn't need this to do well to survive. And you don't need a steam machine (or any >$1000 machine) to play PC games. Just wait it out or buy used hardware. Hell, even an rog ally x plays just about anything (and also supports steamOS), and you can still get that at reasonable prices.
ricardobayes 4mo ago
Still, how does a PS5 cost half, and arguably, has better/fast hardware? I can't imagine Sony selling them at a loss.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  PS5 has a lot parts in high volumes negotiated years in advance so they can leverage lower prices than valve. Valve ships like 10% max of the volumes that Sony sells.
- wil421 4mo ago
  Why can’t you imagine it? The console makers have been selling at a loss for 3 maybe 4/5 decades. Edit: looks like it took 10 million PS5s to break even. The article is 5 years old I wonder if it’s true in 2026.[2] > The existing industrial arrangement at the time was that of a bundled console-plus-cartridge business model, where the console manufacturer (say, Atari with its VCS/2600) sold the console at a loss and cross-subsidized it with the money made on cartridges sold with a huge profit margin.[1] [1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-nintendo-bled-atari-games-to-death/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-nintendo-bled-atari-g... [2] It took Sony years to stop losing money on PS3 sales, but the company stopped selling the PS4 at a loss around six months after its debut in 2013. The PS5 has taken ever so slightly longer, but it’s clearly not repeating the costly exercise of the PS3 despite early reports suggesting Sony was struggling with PS5 pricing due to expensive parts. [2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609150/sony-playstation-5-ps5-loss-profit https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609150/sony-playstation-...
- zipy124 4mo ago
  The PS5 can only play games that you pay Sony a tax to play. The steam machine can play any game, including those bought outside Steam and thus without paying valve a tax. This means the PS5 is subsidised, whereas Valve hardware does not tend to be. They have confirmed that internally all divisions must be roughly profitable/break-even.
  - veber-alex 4mo ago
    While you are technically correct, 99% of all games that are going to be played on this device are going to come from steam where they take a 30% cut. I don't know how much money they make from each unit but major profit is not the goal here. They want to sell more games to more casual people who don't even own a PC anymore.
artyom 4mo ago
Most of the general, watered down tone of Corporate America that we love to hate comes from the legal department, usually at the late-stage point when they make all the decisions in a company: product, business, launches, strategy, direction, etc. Everything needs to run through legal, and they have a final say on everything, including every public communication. That's why I'd love an interview with Steam's legal head. Sounds like they'd have some wild stories to share.
empath75 4mo ago
This is why Apple locks in supplier prices years in advance.
- Aperocky 4mo ago
  That would only works until it doesn't. The suppliers got supplier too and those in turn have their own supplier. I don't know about any specific contract but I bet there's a force majeure or price excluding input cost somewhere.
  - dodobirdlord 4mo ago
    Places like Apple run their supply chains to ground. Literally in some cases, as they track sourcing of component materials back to the mines they are dug out of.
- voxic11 4mo ago
  Computer hardware prices tend to go down over time so in general this is a pretty bad strategy. Of course in rare times like these it can pay off.
  - sltkr 4mo ago
    Presumably this is calculated into the contract. If the price is expected to fall over time, then the negotiated price is below market at the beginning and above market at the end. From the suppliers view, they take a loss in the early years that they recover later. Apple probably pays a premium to shift this risk to the supplier. Besides that they don't take a loss just because prices tend to fall. They only lose if market prices fall more steeply than expected.
  - empath75 4mo ago
    Do you think Apple locks in _current_ prices?
- mattstir 4mo ago
  Apple is also an absolutely enormous company. Even if Valve wanted to lock in prices, they're simply too small for RAM manufacturers to notice on their radar, unfortunately.
tiahura 4mo ago
Is that the coupon code that brings it down to a competitive price?

giancarlostoro 4mo ago

I have a feeling it would have cost drastically less if we didn't have a RAM / storage crisis, which is really sad.

NothingAboutAny 4mo ago
there's probably ~$150 in the ram and ~$100 in the SSD alone, not to mention everything else. we gotta have data-centers though because, uh.. well, we gotta have em.
- dannyw 4mo ago
  To a large extent, all these datacenters are being built because people want tokens. Do you use something like Opus or GPT5.5 for coding? Well, you're part of the demand. If you don't, then yes, as a PC enthusiast I'm sad as well. But like, it's a little bit ironic to be complaining about RAM prices if you've got 5 sub-agents hacking away.
  - Dylan16807 4mo ago
    If someone is using heavily underpriced tokens I don't blame them much either. They're not funding the hardware purchases, super-investors that want to control the AI world are.
starkrights 4mo ago
I’ve seen from a couple of places that a valver has commented that they can’t say exactly what the original price goal was, but that you can get an idea from the price increase of the steamdeck (~$200 usd) That wouldve put the steam machine somewhere around the $800 mark for the base edition, which would’ve been so, so much sweeter of a value proposition.
- frollogaston 4mo ago
  I feel bad for them running into this shortage right before launch. Steam Machine was announced before all this.
shantara 4mo ago
The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation, which would have changed the equation drastically. I even considered getting it as a mostly streaming box for a living room, intending to play only the lighter games on device. But for the announced price and after delays, it just doesn't make sense financially. As is, you're grossly overpaying for the level of GPU performance Steam Machine offers.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  >The original price should have been in $700-800 range, pre-RAM and storage pricing escalation Also on a 2025 launch, but that 2023 mid-level hardware feels already pretty weak in 2026, especially for a console you're supposed to run 6-7 years into the future. Sure, it's as powerful as a base PS5 but that console is already 6 years old by now. So the valve box is a pain to justify jumping in unless you're a big valve fan and don't want to DIY a PC.
  - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
    What's most surprising is the benchmarks dont look too hot vs the PS5... which doesn't cost nearly as much.
    - mywittyname 4mo ago
      Sony are masters of optimizations. Some of their PC ports run really well on the Steam Deck.

Gigachad 4mo ago

Valve's communication around this release has redirected all rage towards Sam Altman rather than the Steam Machine.

bigyabai 4mo ago
The "rage" is largely surrounding the price, not the Machine hardware itself. The Deck sold like hotcakes at $400. We'll see actual outrage when the masses defer new smartphone upgrades due to price bumps.
- TomK32 4mo ago
  I'm pretty sure they would have loved to put a better GPU chip in but that would have cost too much extra in these mad days.
- redsocksfan45 4mo ago
  [dead]
- Sharlin 4mo ago
  If there's anything good to be found about the Ramageddon, it's that people will hopefully keep using their perfectly good phones and other hardware a bit longer between upgrades.
embedding-shape 4mo ago
That's the beauty of the "There are a variety of reasons" part, whatever you believe to be the reason, Valve seems to agree with you, biases or not.
- Gigachad 4mo ago
  The variety of reasons being Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc. We all know why hardware has become unaffordable even if Valve hasn't spelled it out.
  - 4mo ago

juleiie 4mo ago

I love it I won’t buy it But wow what a nice communication That’s gonna look great on post mortem report

cubefox 4mo ago

> There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. I'm pretty sure the price increase is exclusively caused by LLMs.

Forgeties79 4mo ago

I totally get where they’re coming from but sadly it doesn’t change the fact that $1100+ is a tough sell for the benchmarks they’re hitting.

port11 4mo ago
Given the price of components right now, I don’t know. 1k for that small of a form factor seems acceptable. It’s a nice addition to the living room, could likely play a role in cancelling expensive video streaming subscriptions. Might also run some local LLMs. Seems decent.
- Forgeties79 4mo ago
  I love my steam deck and I just don’t see this working, but time will tell. If they sell 2-3mill units I’d consider that a wild success and that i was dead wrong. really hope I am. Steam machine will really change the game if it success
elxr 4mo ago
They know it's a tough sell. Fortunately for everyone in the market, you can still find used CPUs/GPUs/RAM pretty easily and save a decent amount if you're ok with building your own. Valve doesn't need this to do well to survive. And you don't need a steam machine (or any >$1000 machine) to play PC games. Just wait it out or buy used hardware. Hell, even an rog ally x plays just about anything (and also supports steamOS), and you can still get that at reasonable prices.

ricardobayes 4mo ago

Still, how does a PS5 cost half, and arguably, has better/fast hardware? I can't imagine Sony selling them at a loss.

joe_mamba 4mo ago
PS5 has a lot parts in high volumes negotiated years in advance so they can leverage lower prices than valve. Valve ships like 10% max of the volumes that Sony sells.
wil421 4mo ago
Why can’t you imagine it? The console makers have been selling at a loss for 3 maybe 4/5 decades. Edit: looks like it took 10 million PS5s to break even. The article is 5 years old I wonder if it’s true in 2026.[2] > The existing industrial arrangement at the time was that of a bundled console-plus-cartridge business model, where the console manufacturer (say, Atari with its VCS/2600) sold the console at a loss and cross-subsidized it with the money made on cartridges sold with a huge profit margin.[1] [1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-nintendo-bled-atari-games-to-death/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-nintendo-bled-atari-g... [2] It took Sony years to stop losing money on PS3 sales, but the company stopped selling the PS4 at a loss around six months after its debut in 2013. The PS5 has taken ever so slightly longer, but it’s clearly not repeating the costly exercise of the PS3 despite early reports suggesting Sony was struggling with PS5 pricing due to expensive parts. [2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609150/sony-playstation-5-ps5-loss-profit https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/4/22609150/sony-playstation-...
zipy124 4mo ago
The PS5 can only play games that you pay Sony a tax to play. The steam machine can play any game, including those bought outside Steam and thus without paying valve a tax. This means the PS5 is subsidised, whereas Valve hardware does not tend to be. They have confirmed that internally all divisions must be roughly profitable/break-even.
- veber-alex 4mo ago
  While you are technically correct, 99% of all games that are going to be played on this device are going to come from steam where they take a 30% cut. I don't know how much money they make from each unit but major profit is not the goal here. They want to sell more games to more casual people who don't even own a PC anymore.

artyom 4mo ago

Most of the general, watered down tone of Corporate America that we love to hate comes from the legal department, usually at the late-stage point when they make all the decisions in a company: product, business, launches, strategy, direction, etc. Everything needs to run through legal, and they have a final say on everything, including every public communication. That's why I'd love an interview with Steam's legal head. Sounds like they'd have some wild stories to share.

empath75 4mo ago

This is why Apple locks in supplier prices years in advance.

Aperocky 4mo ago
That would only works until it doesn't. The suppliers got supplier too and those in turn have their own supplier. I don't know about any specific contract but I bet there's a force majeure or price excluding input cost somewhere.
- dodobirdlord 4mo ago
  Places like Apple run their supply chains to ground. Literally in some cases, as they track sourcing of component materials back to the mines they are dug out of.
voxic11 4mo ago
Computer hardware prices tend to go down over time so in general this is a pretty bad strategy. Of course in rare times like these it can pay off.
- sltkr 4mo ago
  Presumably this is calculated into the contract. If the price is expected to fall over time, then the negotiated price is below market at the beginning and above market at the end. From the suppliers view, they take a loss in the early years that they recover later. Apple probably pays a premium to shift this risk to the supplier. Besides that they don't take a loss just because prices tend to fall. They only lose if market prices fall more steeply than expected.
- empath75 4mo ago
  Do you think Apple locks in _current_ prices?
mattstir 4mo ago
Apple is also an absolutely enormous company. Even if Valve wanted to lock in prices, they're simply too small for RAM manufacturers to notice on their radar, unfortunately.

tiahura 4mo ago

Is that the coupon code that brings it down to a competitive price?