Steam Machine price is easier to predict after Valve’s Steam Deck increase
And it isn’t looking good
🤔 It might have gotten easier to predict the price of the Steam Machine after Valve raised Steam Deck prices
📈 Leaker SadlyItsBradley has said he was told the console will be higher than the current Steam Deck pricing
💰 For reference, the Steam Deck is now costs between $750 and $1000, depending on model
😬 Our own originally specced comparable system is also nearly $1200, when it was $780 when the Steam Machine was first announced
We still don’t know how much the Steam Machine is going to cost, although making a prediction has become a little easier after the hefty price rise Valve has implemented for the Steam Deck.
If you weren’t aware, Valve has raised the price of the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED by nearly 50% to make the 512GB model $789 and the 1TB model $949 – that works out to a 44% and 46% jump, respectively.
With this in mind, a recent X post from leaker SadlyItsBradley has stated that he was told an estimate for Valve’s starting price for the upcoming Steam Machine and that it could be “higher than today’s Steam Deck prices”.
His post stated he was told this some two months ago, although this was preceded by the caveat that it was “just whispers in my ear” and nothing “official”.
This isn’t good news, although it’s perhaps to be expected, given how the memory crisis has affected Valve’s plans for the Steam Machine and Steam Frame so far.
Even as we approach the middle of 2026, we still don’t know when the Steam Machine is going to launch or how much it’s going to cost, even though Valve has maintained it’ll launch this year.
At the time of its announcement, Valve said it wanted to price the device to a ‘similarly specced gaming PC’ and looked to the Steam Hardware Survey for a baseline of the system most folks are using.
According to Valve, the Steam Machine will reportedly match or outperform 70 percent of Steam users’ existing hardware, with the original idea to maintain price parity with those kinds of more affordable systems.
At the time of release, a comparably specced custom PC with components close to what’s inside the Steam Machine cost $780 or thereabouts. That same PCPartPicker list today is going to cost you closer to $1200, which lays bare the kind of cost we can expect the Steam Machine to take.
It doesn’t seem unreasonable, therefore, to say that the Steam Machine’s price is likely to be a four-figure sum in both its base and upgraded storage formats, which isn’t good news for those who were expecting it to hit a value-oriented sweet spot as had originally been predicted back in November 2025.
In a small shining light for Valve’s hardware decision, Valve launched the $100 Steam Controller recently, and it sold out in a matter of 30 minutes after receiving strong reviews in the tech press last week, although the brand has introduced a reservation queue system to get controllers in the hands of users when they come back into stock.
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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.