Surprise: Valve’s new Steam machine is here, but the price is the real shocker
Valve Software suddenly opened reservations for its latest Steam console on Monday, but due to the ongoing shortage of the PC component, it did so at a much higher price than expected.
The company, headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., began announcing a new version of the Steam Machine late last year. It’s a compact, powerful gaming PC made for your living room, running Linux-based SteamOS like Valve’s Steam Deck.
The 2026 Steam Machine starts at $1,049 through Valve’s digital storefront, which gets the base model with an internal 512GB SSD. The top-end model with a 2TB drive costs $1,349, and both come bundled with one of Valve’s new Steam controllers.
On paper, it’s an impressive device overall, especially as a sort of gateway product for anyone who would like to get into gaming on PCs and/or Linux. However, its price is a significant obstacle. A relatively powerful PC still costs as much or more, but Valve’s old strategy with Steam Deck, by comparison, was to give it away.
As it turns out, Valve isn’t particularly happy about the price, casually addressing the concerns in an official Steam blog post. The short version is that the planned launch of the machine has been hampered by ongoing issues surrounding SSDs and RAM.
The prices “reflect the global state of production; or, more accurately, reflect the price of components as we have protected them over the past 6 months,” the company said in a post.
The internal storage capacity of the Steam machine models is the only difference between them. Both gaming PCs pack “custom” AMD CPUs and GPUs, 16 GB of RAM, Bluetooth capability, an ethernet port, and microSD card slot in a 6” black cube, complete with a removable faceplate.
The high cost of entry to the Steam Machine is another knock-on effect from the ongoing global shortage of RAM and SSD, which was initially caused by the high demand from the growing AI industry. The same problems have led to a rise in the prices of many current-generation gaming consoles and increased the cost of newly built gaming PCs. It’s been a bad time for the hobby as a whole, especially for newcomers and players on a budget.
The device is unlikely to fail, but its cost may mean that for now, it turns into an expensive gadget toy. One of Valve’s quiet ambitions for years has been to bring more people to PC gaming, and especially PC gaming on Linux, but with thousands of dollars to throw around, the machine won’t attract any new customers.
That suggests that if a company like Valve, which controls nearly half of the PC games in the world through Steam, has problems like this, it’s wise to expect more disruption for the foreseeable future. Xbox in particular has been talking about launching a new console at the end of 2027, but with the cost of RAM and SSD rising, it looks like the next generation of hardware will be more expensive or delayed for a few years.
As with Deck, you get games on the device by direct download from Valve’s digital storefront Steam. And as with the Deck, the machine is designed to be used as a desktop computer as well, with no specific guardrails to accommodate modders and modders.
Even with their higher cost, and the lower number of units available at launch than Valve had planned, the 2026 burner was already listed as “out of stock” within 10 minutes of the opening of the store page, which was before Valve itself officially announced that it had done so.
However, Valve has implemented a lottery system to discourage sellers and try to make the process as fair as possible. Any interested buyers can sign up for a Steam machine reservation any time before this coming Thursday, when Valve will randomly change the lineup. Anyone who does not sign in on Thursday will be placed on a waiting list.
