Steam Hardware

Valve directly stated that they had to reconsider their pricing for the steam machine (i.e. increase it substantially more than originally intended) because of the obscenely inflated costs of components. This isn’t just about the steam machine being “too expensive,” the prices for it are quite literally far higher than they should be, albeit with it being for the most part out of Valve’s hands. It’s far more complicated than consumers being greedy and desensitized.

Source for Valve’s statement: https://www.pcmag.com/news/valve-confirms-steam-machine-will-cost-over-1000-heres-how-to-buy-one

Valve notes that the RAM crunch has impacted pricing. "The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of [the] Steam Machine is no longer viable," it says. "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 six months."

Hol, hol, hol up... Commodore Phone? 🤔

Huh, I'll be damned!

https://commodore.net/callback/

I’m surprised people think $1,100 is expensive for a gaming PC, even outside the crazy memory market now.

$1100 isn't expensive for a gaming PC. It is, however, expensive for this gaming PC because it's so incredibly underpowered and non upgradeable that it may as well not even be called a gaming PC. This thing struggles hard to hit playable framerates in current gen games. Even at 720p they're struggling to hit 30fps. For "next gen" games it's basically going to just be left in the dark, won't even be able to play them. The memory bandwidth is terrible, the 8GB VRAM is terrible, the CPU is terrible, and the GPU is literally scraping the bottom of the barrel.

At this exorbitant price it's DOA. It'll no doubt sell out because of the steam fangirls buying anything valve throws at them, but they'll be producing so few of this thing that selling out will mean nothing. They should have cancelled this as soon as they couldn't launch it for $500.

Let's pick Oct 2025 as our 'pre RAMpocalypse' time frame.

Data source: pangoly.com

(I removed BestBuy from the visuals because it is an extremely erratic dataset that basically bounces around the average of others, but makes the graph nearly unreadable)

16GB DDR5 Crucial RAM

Oct 2025: ~$50

Jun 2026: ~$275

2TB NVME M.2 Crucial SSD

Oct 2025: ~$140

Jun 2026: ~$300 (if you remove Adorama)

512GB NVME M.2 Kingston SSD

Oct 2025: ~$50

Jun 2026: ~$200

$275 - $50 = $225

$300 - $140 = $160

$225 + $160 = $385

Thus, the 2TB variant has an effective ~$385 upcharge due to the RAMpocalypse.

2TB variant MSRP is $1349, thus it would be ~$964 pre-RAMpocalypse, meaning that the RAMpocalypse % upcharge is ~39.9%

Do the same with the 512GB variant:

$275 - $50 = $225

$200 - $50 = $150

$225 + $150 = $375

$375 effective RAMpocalypse upcharge.

MSRP of 512GB variant is $1050, thus it would be ~$675 pre-RAMpocalypse, % upcharge of ~55.5%

Obviously this methodology is not perfectly correct, but I'd argue its quite reasonable 'napkin math'... you could maybe make a more exhaustive index of all prices of all brands of RAM/SSD in exact performance spec matches to be slightly more accurate, but yeah, roughly, the RAMpocalypse made the Steam Machine, about $380, or 40% to 55% more expensive than it otherwise would have been, depending on 2TB vs 512GB.

Also I guess we are here just assuming Valve is just selling these things basically at cost, neither subsidizing nor gouging the price, in all scenarios, which I am also confident is and always was basically the plan.

Also also, economist brain says:

~50% inflation in less than a year for pretty much an entire segment of the CPI is uh... pretty fucking bad, to use the 'formal' terminology.

speculation says 750ish. which really would have been perfect

https://steamdeckhq.com/news/valve-steam-machine-original-price/

Apparently Valve said to look at the Steam Deck price hike for a clue. So probably around $750 for the base model.

Same for me. I was expecting like $1200 for the base model which nobody should pay that much for such middling specs.

But still $1k is way more than I'd pay for an HTPC. I'd much rather the steam link approach and use streaming to my already nice and powerful desktop. I guess this is a nice thing to point newbies who want a box that should "just work" and don't already have something and don't want to build.

I'm considering getting one. I currently have a nearly silent computer working as a HTPC but I can't play games on it. I can get around that with Steam Link, but that isn't ideal. So, it would be an upgrade that would let me play games on my living room TV without needing to tie up the gaming computer.

The other thing it looks ideal for is a travel computer. Gaming laptops suck. Often they're absurdly expensive. When they're decently powerful, they're almost always obscenely loud. That fan whine really bothers me. Plus, they almost always have major Linux compatibility issues. The current laptop I'm using with Linux has weird driver quirks. Like, for example, to re-enable WiFi after it goes to sleep I need to wake it up from sleep, turn on airplane mode and then turn it off again. Only then will the WiFi work again. And getting an external monitor to work after sleep... ugh.

Also, I think it's easy to underestimate the value of what is effectively a Linux gaming console. I'm almost exclusively a PC gamer these days, but one thing I always appreciated about consoles is that you never had to ask "will this game run well on my console?" 99.9% of the time, if a game was released for a console, it was optimized for that console. Even when a game was multi-platform like say FIFA, each console got a build that was as good as possible for that console. For PC games, I think that means most developers will have a Gabecube and ensure all their games run as well as possible on it. The fact that it's Linux-first is also important to me. It means any drivers or software updates will be tested and optimized on Linux. It won't be an afterthought like it is most of the time.

So, this machine is nearly silent, runs Linux, and plays most of the games in my Steam library. It's expensive, but maybe it's worth it?

It's hard to hold the steep price point against Valve when their communication looks like this.

The common Gabe W.

Yep. Storage prices are insane.

price shown in USD not including tax/vat