We know a lot about the Steam Machine. We know its specifications. We know what it looks like inside. We even know what it’s like to game on it. But we don’t know how much it’ll cost or when it will be available, outside of sometime in the new year.
So, I’ve asked around the PC Gamer team to find out what we think. With plenty of details on what’s inside this machine, and Valve’s tactics for the Steam Deck, we have most of the information we need to take an educated guess at the price. We don’t know anything more than we’ve already said in our various stories on Valve’s Linux box. We’re simply piecing together our expectations, Valve’s history, the specs, and some amount of vibes-based optimism from the team—a large amount of vibes-based optimism from the team.
I’ve tallied up an average from our guesses—or those of us brave enough to actually take a guess—and it’s around $525. That’s notwithstanding the difference between the smaller 512 GB model and the much larger 2 TB model, however, which may well cost in excess of $100 more based on today’s Steam Deck OLED pricing.
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Jeremy Laird, Contributor: Valve has clearly gone to great lengths to make the Steam Machine cheap. That AMD GPU is not only an old Radeon RX 7600 chip from three years ago. It’s got bits turned off. Valve also decided not to give it 16 GB, which technically would have been easily done, another clear value play. So, Valve is getting access to a load of very cheap, binned-off GPUs for the Steam Machine.
Valve also has form when it comes to aggressive pricing. The Steam Deck is pretty aggressively priced and always has been. In short, Valve isn’t about bleeding edge prices and big margins. On the basis of all that, and the reality that the Steam Machine needs to be compelling versus current consoles, I’m expecting at least the entry-level 512 GB version to actually undercut mainstream consoles. In other words, it will be under $499.
The complicating factor here is the ongoing RAM and storage price crisis. That will make hitting whatever price Valve was originally aiming at harder and will also impact higher spec models with more storage. But overall, I still expect the Steam Machine to very much land at the cheaper end of plausible pricing spectrum.
Jess Kinghorn, Hardware Writer: Despite the state of, well, everything, I’m still hopeful for a reasonably priced Steam Machine. The Steam Deck itself kept costs down by betting on already proven, last-gen tech too, so perhaps adopting a similar approach for the Steam Machine means a price tag in the ball park (or perhaps swinging for the parking lot) of the $600 mark isn’t just blue sky thinking. For the sake of her wallet, a girl can dream.
(Image credit: Future)
Nick Evanson, Hardware Writer: Compared to the usual of handheld gaming PCs, the Steam Deck is an absolute bargain and it’s pretty clear that was Valve’s strategy from the start: Use basic or old hardware, strip away everything that’s superfluous, and you’ll be able to sell something at a low price point and still come away with a reasonable profit margin. On paper, the same should apply with the new Steam Machine, as it’s as perfunctory as possible, with hardware that wouldn’t even grace an entry-level gaming laptop.
But that doesn’t mean the Steam Machine will sport a $400 or $500 price tag. The cost of some components is going to be very much out of Valve’s hands (e.g. the DDR5 and GDDR6 RAM modules, and the SSD), so it will come down to whether enough has been saved elsewhere by using bargain bin parts for the CPU and GPU.
I’m pretty confident that it won’t be seriously north of $500, though; perhaps $599 at most (for the max SSD version). That’s because, unlike most handheld and mini PC vendors, Valve has far more sway in the PC market, and a healthy dose of cash to pay up-front for chip and component orders. Whether you’d want to splash out $500 or so on a little box that’s a bit rubbish specs-wise is another question altogether.
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(Image credit: Future)
Jacob Fox, Hardware Writer: The main problem that Valve will face, in my opinion, is that it’s made quite the name for itself with the Steam Deck. I mean, that handheld is still sitting pretty on our best handheld gaming PC guide as the best budget option, three years after launch. And that’s because it offers so much for such a low price tag.
Valve admitted it chose a “painful” but “critical” price point for the Steam Deck, to get people onto the platform and make the Deck ubiquitous with handheld gaming, and of course further cement Steam’s monopoly. Valve hasn’t officially confirmed this, as far as I can tell, but it’s often said that the Steam Deck was initially sold at a loss.
That’s a lot of pressure for the Steam Machine, don’t you think? Mini PCs cost a heck of a lot, as do non-Deck handhelds. But people expect something different from Valve. I fear that people will be expecting the Deck’s “painful” pricing ported over to the Steam Deck.
What this would mean, I think, is something in the $400–$550 ballpark, which would seriously compete with consoles as well as, of course, mini PCs. But if Valve doesn’t bite that bullet, I’d expect something in the $600–750 range, and I’m not sure people will take too kindly to that. Perhaps they’d have a point, too, given we won’t be getting the full mini PC Windows experience and all the app and game compatibility that brings. Valve could be in a lose-lose situation.
(Image credit: Future)
(Image credit: Future)
James Bentley, Hardware Writer: Valve has picked a strange time to launch the Steam Machine. We’re likely not all that far away from the next generation of whatever Sony and Microsoft put out next, which risks ageing the device pretty quickly. As well as this, all kinds of hardware shortages lead to concerns around stock stability coming up to its launch. So, there are reasons why the Steam Machine may come in at a higher price than otherwise expected of its performance, but should that matter to the end user? Probably not.
I think the play with a device like this is to capture part of the audience that Valve has already courted. A Steam Machine could make for a good console replacement, hooked up to the TV and the fact that you’ve likely already got a backlog that’s ever-growing only strengthens its case. You’d be practically losing money buying a new console instead. With this in mind, a Steam Machine could still be a roaring success even if it just about breaks even. The broader ‘Valve ecosystem’ feels more important than any one-off device, and the Machine clocking at console prices is exactly what it needs.
(Image credit: Future)
Jacob Ridley, Managing Editor, Hardware: The Steam Machine has to be pretty affordable. I have a few reasons for believing this but I’ll try to keep it short. Here’s my case:
Exhibit A: The Steam Deck.
Valve’s handheld gaming PC was not the first of its kind, though it’s most definitely the most famous. It’s the one that most people think of first when someone mentions a handheld gaming PC. That’s partially down to the pull that Valve has over PC gamers—the reason we’re even writing this article is because of that very pull—but it’s also because the Steam Deck, despite its under-powered hardware, is so gosh-darn affordable. It’s stuck around, too. High-end handhelds live and die at the cutting-edge to justify their lofty price tags—the Steam Deck doesn’t. It uses software and settings to get around some of the concerns with its lowly hardware and, even though it’s practically ancient tech now, it’s still the recommendation for many. Sure, I’m talking about a handheld when I really should be talking about the Steam Machine, but I don’t think Valve will have forgotten what made the Steam Deck so good when planning its latest SteamOS-powered machine.
Oh, and the fact it is using SteamOS means there’s no costs to slap Windows on it, and Valve has a pretty good reason to get as many people using the Steam Machine and Steam Deck as possible. Building familiarity with Linux as a gaming OS is the long-term goal here: it drove the plan for the first Steam Machines a decade ago as much as it is this newest revision.
Exhibit B: The innards.
I headed over to Valve to see the Steam Machine in person, and during our time with it, one of its principal engineers, Yazan Aldehaayat, showed us a version with the casing removed. A nude Steam Machine. Underneath its uninteresting black shell, it’s a unitary machine. A solitary heatsink with a single fan. Sure, these are custom design that might push the price up a bit, but Valve is ordering enough to get a bit of a discount. This unified thermal solution saves extra components elsewhere, as does the compact 200 W power supply. If you can sell a gaming laptop for less than $1000 with a screen, keyboard, and more, it’s possible to make something cheaper with less.
As Aldehaayat told me at the time, the power supply is the chassis on this thing. It’s structurally holding the Machine together. So that’s another cost-saving right there. The inclusion of discrete antenna for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the Steam Controller seem a little less money-savvy, but the spartan selection of ports suggests savings. There’s only a single USB Type-C and one NVMe slot.
The GPU is also hewn out of one of AMD’s most affordable GPUs, Navi 33, which is distinctly not the cutting-edge. It’s RDNA 3, notably last-gen, as is the six-core CPU. It’s using the Zen 4 architecture—the same used by Ryzen 7000-series chips. It also comes with 8 GB of VRAM, which to the disdain of some, is cheaper than 16 GB.
Exhibit C: The market.
We’re not short of high-end mini PCs. This is not a new frontier for PC gaming like handheld PCs were back in 2022. Some might argue that a console-like box for the living room is new, and I can see the case there, but it’s perfectly possible to buy or build your own PC right now and have nearly the same experience using Big Picture Mode. I would know, I have a living room PC built into the compact Fractal Terra that sits below my TV.
But the problem with my tiny living room PC is that it was expensive. Mini-ITX parts are costly, despite being a fraction of the size of ATX parts (because they’re a fraction of the size, really), and you need to be able to stuff some sort of discrete graphics card into a compact case to get much hope of gaming performance out of it at 4K. You might have noticed that graphics cards are neither cheap nor small. Anything suitably small is no longer cheap, and vice versa—this is the way of PC gaming.
Now, it could be true that by shrinking everything down to fit inside the Steam Machine (which is smaller than it appears in pictures), Valve would’ve also had to spend more money. But then what’s the point? What is Valve bringing to the table? What’s the engineering challenge? It doesn’t make much sense to have another expensive mini PC in the market when gaming NUCs already exist. It’s an engineering challenge to make a tiny gaming PC, but it’s an even greater challenge making it anywhere near affordable. I have some faith that Valve is keen to take on that challenge.
Verdict:
There are two models of Steam Machine on the way: 512 GB and 2 TB. Much like the Steam Frame (which comes in 256 GB and 1 TB models), this gives Valve the flexibility to top-and-tail price. It can offer one machine at the more affordable end of the market, say, $529, and another at a higher price, say, $649—Valve knows the pre-orders will roll in for the more expensive one anyways. Plus you can get an RTX 5060 build for like, $750–$800, so Valve can’t go much higher without dooming the Steam Machine concept to another 10 years in purgatory.
(Image credit: Future)
Andy Edser, Hardware Writer: The Steam Machine needs to be well-priced to move in serious numbers, and after a year of keeping track of hardware prices worldwide, I’ve got my teeth clenched.
Of course, Valve will be using its considerable weight (not to mention its vast financial resources) combined with careful component choices to bring the Steam Machine down to a price it thinks most adopters will pay. I think it’s very unlikely we’ll be seeing, say, an $800+ machine, as at that point you might as well pick up a considerably larger (and more powerful) pre-built gaming PC instead, and I don’t think Valve is looking to compete at that level.
But dropping under the $500 marker feels like a stretch too far if it plans to make a decent profit. Really, this depends as to whether Valve is happy to sit on low margins to encourage adoption, or whether fluctuating hardware prices worldwide, combined with a desire to pay off R&D costs, results in a price tag that bites.
I’d lean slightly towards the former, and say that I’d expect the 512 GB version to come in between $500 to $600, with the 2 TB model edging into $700 territory. Valve has the financial resources to lean back a little on profit margins, and the older hardware inside the Steam Machine, combined with some obvious internal efforts towards cost-saving, seems carefully weighted towards an attractive MSRP. Adoption is key here, and Valve has had its fingers burnt in the hardware market before. As usual, though, I’m prepared to be catastrophically wrong.
Screw it, $350. We’d all fall off our chairs, wouldn’t we?
(Image credit: Future)
Dave James, Editor-in-chief, Hardware: It’s a toughie really. Valve has set out its stall to make this a budget-friendly machine, with its resolutely last-gen technology, but what it views as budget might be very different to what we want to see as a budget gaming PC.
While I’d love to see a $399 price tag on the 512 GB version of the Steam Machine, I’m realistic enough to think that’s asking for a touch too much generosity from Uncle Gabe. You don’t become a multi-billionnaire by giving stuff away.
That is, after all, the price of the 256 GB LCD version of the Steam Deck, and with the Steam Machine’s RDNA 3 GPU delivering more than six times the performance of the Valve handheld, it would be strange to have that level of price parity. They are very different devices, though, and you do regularly get a wide disparity between the price/performance numbers of desktops vs. gaming laptops.
If we stick with the Steam Deck as a yardstick, however, then you could look at the 512 GB Steam Machine coming in at the same $549 as the 512 GB Steam Deck OLED and the 2 TB option hitting the $649 of the 1 TB OLED handheld.
What I would say is that, with only two possible options, I reckon Valve is going to want to be able to slap a $499 sticker on there because that looks sooooo much more tempting than anything over $500. So, I’m going to put my marker down on $499 for the 512 GB option and $649 for the 2 TB Steam Machine.
I mean, we know Valve can almost price the lower-end model however it likes; with pre-orders likely to be as heavily weighted towards the top-end model as they were when the Steam Deck first launched, it’s going to be making most of its money on the 2 TB device.
