Valve’s Steam Machine finally has a price: a whopping $1,049 for the 512GB configuration or $1,349 for the 2TB version. And those are without bundled controllers, which drive up the cost more.
The prices are so high in part because Valve isn’t subsidizing the hardware, and the company has already indicated that the component crisis forced it to reconsider its initial pricing plans. In an interview with the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, Valve engineers discussed the reality of sourcing RAM in 2026, with take-it-or-leave-it prices as memory and other components remain in short supply, from only a few vendors like Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix.
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Valve, of course, isn’t the only company in a bind over memory shortages, as the crunch is forcing many hardware makers to make significant pricing changes. Even Apple CEO Tim Cook is warning of incoming price hikes for iPhones, Macs, and other devices. And the RAM crunch isn’t projected to get better anytime soon.
So like… genuine question: what do you propose they do? Operate at a loss indefinitely? Go into an industry they have zero experience and domain knowledge in and just “build a factory”? And industry, I should add, that is probably the single most complicated and technically - as well as capex - intensive industry that humans have thus far derived? What’s the play here? Drive themselves to bankruptcy out of altruism?
Two realistic options. One, depends if the devices are already manufactured. If yes, you sell them at the prices when you manufactured them. That shows good will for the community, and gets devices out and people wanting to buy in to a niche product.
If they haven’t manufactured the devices, then the answer is easy, you simply won’t be making them because they are too expensive to get a large run in until prices go down.
The bigger problem though is the old off the shelf hardware being used here is going to age out incredibly fast. So a third option would be what many of the minipc companies are doing, and give an option for barebones, and let you bring your own RAM and SSD. No option is perfect, but just raising prices higher than a PS5 Pro with no controller and worse performance, you aren’t winning over new customers, and you are pushing your old customers away.
At the same time, standing still and doing nothing is a recipe for someone else to eat their lunch.
My point is that Valve is fundamentally a for-profit company, not a charitable organization. Expecting them to do nothing in response to the wildest market disruptions that the consumer hardware industry has ever seen is frankly unrealistic.
At the end of the day, Valve has been successful because they have been able to balance strategic, long term profitability with providing a genuinely good service at a reasonable market price to the vast majority of their customers. Note that that is specifically not giving things away at cost (as nice as that might be in the short term for customers. In the long run, zero (or negative) profitability would mean Valve ceases to exist.
I’m not trying to suckle at the corporate teat here - I’m simply pointing out that pretending Valve isn’t a corporation is flat out delusional. Not to mention, everyone else’s prices are going to be spiking too. They’re not “the bad guys”, and they will absolutely not be the only ones doing it.
I mean, Valve has been successful solely because they have cornered the game distribution market. Their hardware has done essentially zero for their bottom line. They could have simply never release this product (as they didn’t for the original Steam Machine) in a realistic sense, and been done with it.
Their hardware (pointedly, the steam deck) has begun a diametric shift towards Linux gaming. The fact that our fuckwit Captains of Industry are pinning the throttle and driving at a wall, and in the process gutting the consumer electronics market is, ultimately, just really awful luck and timing. If it weren’t for that, I dare say Valve would be looking at becoming a Serious Player in the hardware market. As it stands, this will certainly significantly stymie the adoption of the GabeCube… but I hope that ultimately, when the market stabilized (or corrects) in time, they’ll still be on track to do that.