Steam Machine price: how much will Valve’s living room PC console cost?
We're still waiting for Valve to announce the price
💰 Valve hasn’t released pricing details for its impending Steam Machine just yet, leading to speculation as to how much it might cost
📈 A good estimate seems to be in the $500-$800 range, given Valve’s comments that the system’s price will be similar to a “similarly specced gaming PC”
📊 Valve looked to the Steam Hardware Survey in judging the specs of the machine, with it meeting or exceeding the specs that around 70 percent of Steam users already have
🤔 It could look to be aggressively priced like the Steam Deck, although that idea may be null because of potential tariff issues
Valve’s new Steam Machine is due out early next year, but how much will it cost?
The Steam Machine‘s price hasn’t been announced by Valve just yet, and likely won’t be revealed until we get closer to the device’s release date in 2026.
Nevertheless, Valve’s reluctance to announce the Steam Machine’s price doesn’t stop us from making an educated guess based on its components, Valve’s own words, and other hardware on the market.
“A similarly specced gaming PC”
In conversations with IGN, Valve said the price of the Steam Machine would be comparable to a “similarly specced gaming PC.”
Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat said that the team wanted to make the machine affordable, but powerful enough that the system could handle every game in a user’s Steam library.
With this goal in mind, Valve looked to the Steam Hardware Survey as a baseline for the kind of system most folks are using. According to Valve, the Steam Machine will reportedly match or outperform 70 percent of Steam users’ existing hardware.
The notion of a “similarly specced gaming PC” is a hard one to judge, as Valve is using some semi-custom AMD silicon as the basis for this small form factor option. However, we can unpack the specs and judge what it might cost as a result.
Steam Machine specs:
CPU: 4.8GHz, 6-core, AMD Zen 4
GPU: 8.9 teraflop RDNA 3 GPU, 28 CUs
RAM: 16GB DDR5-SODIMM
SSD: 512GB/2TB SSD, upgradeable
microSD slot
Size: H 6 x D 6.4 x W 6.1 inches
Weight: 2.6kg
The closest CPU you can put into a DIY system that matches the Steam Machine is a Ryzen 5 7500F, or the more widely available Ryzen 5 7600. Both are built on AMD’s Zen 4 architecture with six cores and 12 threads.
The GPU is a little harder to pin down, as none of AMD’s RDNA 3-based desktop GPUs (Radeon RX 7000) have as few as 28 Compute Units. The closest is a Radeon RX 7600 in desktop terms, although the actual GPU inside the Steam Machine is essentially the mobile variant – an RX 7600M.
Using the rest of the specs as a guide, and opting for a smaller form factor build as the Steam Machine is a 6-inch cube, the best price I could come up with using was around $780 using PCPartPicker. That’s for the base 500GB in an mATX form factor. Using the smaller Mini ITX form factor pushes the price up towards $900.
You can also opt for a laptop-style form factor that seeks to mimic the specs differently. The MSI Thin B13VF variant with an Intel Core i5-13420H, RTX 4060 laptop GPU, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD is $780 at the time of writing.
The mini PC problem
The other problem the Steam Machine will face is that of mini PCs. This market sector has gained a lot of momentum in recent years, with leading brands such as GMKTec and Minisforum offering small boxes with powerful processors with integrated graphics plus solid RAM and storage options for quite high prices.
For instance, the Minisforum MS-S1 Max and GMKTec Evo-X2 both provide AMD’s current top APU, the Ryzen AI Max 395+, complete with integrated graphics that can rival an RTX 3060 desktop card, and are priced anywhere from $1499 to well north of $2000, if you spec them with more RAM and SSD storage. If Valve put the Steam Machine this high, it probably wouldn’t sell many units at all.
Being competitive with consoles
The thing with the Steam Machine, as with the Steam Deck, is that it’s designed more as a console-like PC, rather than a high-end gaming PC. Valve’s SteamOS is built around more of an accessible, console-style operating system, complete with an integrated storefront – Steam.
Being almost locked into the Steam ecosystem as soon as the device boots is intentional. Of course, buying games on Steam provides Valve with revenue in the same way purchasing the hardware does.
Console prices in the past have been kept intentionally low to get you into the ecosystem, while game sales on their online marketplaces are the real moneymaker. Of course, being a PC means you could wipe off SteamOS and install Windows, but that may be more for the hobbyist user than the generalist that Valve is targeting with the Steam Machine.
With all of this in mind, I think the ballpark figure for the system could be anywhere from $500 to $800. That’s in and around the price of a similarly specced PC, as per Valve’s previous comments, and affordable enough to potentially make people think twice before buying another pre-built system or building their own.
Valve could equally be as aggressive as it was with the Steam Deck’s base price, although with the issue of tariffs looming, that ship may have sailed. Nintendo had previously faced backlash over the $449 price tag of the Switch 2 as it was notably higher than the original console, although Nintendo USA president Doug Bowser said it had nothing to do with tariffs at the time.
Up next: Steam Controller may be the last gamepad I ever buy for PC – here’s why
Reece Bithrey is a journalist with bylines for Trusted Reviews, Digital Foundry, PC Gamer, TechRadar and more. He also has his own blog, UNTITLED, and graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in International History and Politics in 2023.