Steam Machine price will be 'in line with the current PC market', says Valve – here's what that means
Speculation about the Steam Machine's price rumbles on
🤔 Valve has reaffirmed its take on how much the Steam Machine will cost in another recent interview
💰 Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais has said that the device will be “in line with the current PC market” in terms of price
🤷♂️ He went on to say it would be hard for Valve to provide a definitive price at the moment due to fluctuating costs elsewhere
👉 Valve has previously said that the Steam Machine’s price will be in and around that of a “similarly-specced PC”
Valve has shed more light on the Steam Machine’s price, reaffirming what we’ve already been told about the device.
In a new interview on the Friends Per Second podcast, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais stated that the Steam Machine would not be subsidized, or sold at a loss, as with other consoles. Instead, the Steam Machine price will be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”
He expanded by stating that “if you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at” and that the Steam Machine aimed to be a “good deal” at the target price.
Griffais said that Valve isn’t going to provide a concrete price range as yet, as “right now is just a hard time to have a really good idea of what the price is going to be because there’s a lot of different things that are fluctuating”.
There’s currently a global RAM storage going on due to the demand from AI, which has pushed prices up some computer hardware already, and has the potential to cause the costs of other items, such as SSDs and graphics cards, to spiral.
With this in mind, Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat said in a previous interview that Valve wanted to make the machine affordable, but powerful enough that the system could handle every game in a user’s Steam library. The idea is for it to play any game at 4K/60fps with the help of upscaling if needed.
With this, they looked to the Steam Hardware Survey as a baseline for the kind of system most folks are using. The machine is based on the specs that 70 percent of Steam users already have.
We think the price for the unit may sit between $600 and $800 for a similarly-specced system, as Valve has said, although with external shocks such as the RAM shortage and potential tariff implications, it could be even higher.
Griffais did tease the idea of a Steam Machine Pro as a potential future endeavor for Valve, although it is currently focused on the mid-range level as a “good trade off between affordability and the level of power we get.”
Up next: Steam Machine vs PS5: which system is right for you?
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.