Steam Machine Has a Price Issue, Delay Feels Inevitable
It’s looking like the release window of Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine may be subject to a bit of a delay, and you probably already know exactly why that is.
In mid-November 2025, Valve announced the Steam Machine: a sort of PC/console hybrid that will feature the same ease of use and straightforwardness of a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X, but also offer a level of customisation and freedom that a PC would.
In short, it’s sort of like a pre-built PC that uses a version of SteamOS. You can plug it in and use it straight out of the box, much in the same way you can with a regular console.
Valve is clearly targeting a specific market with the Steam Machine. If you’ve always wanted to play PC games, but you don’t want to deal with the headache of messing around with building a PC yourself or spending hours in menus trying to get your graphics settings right, then the Steam Machine sounds like the perfect middle ground.
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According to Valve, the Steam Machine will launch in “early 2026”. They have previously been a bit more specific about that release window to a few different sources, however, as Digital Foundry stated that “Valve has suggested” a possible “Q1 2026” release date.
That would mean the Steam Machine would be with us by March 31st this year, at the latest. That’s just under three months away.
Here’s the issue: there’s a very, very good chance that recent price hikes and part shortages may force Valve to push that release date back.
You’ve probably already heard that, due to demand from AI datacentres, the price of RAM has skyrocketed over the past few months.
As detailed in an article by Overclocked 3D, the average price of DRAM increased somewhere between 178% to 258% from mid-September to mid-December in 2025.
Things... have gotten a lot worse since then.
In mid-December, Overclocked 3D stated that the Crucial Pro DDR5-6000 2x16GB CL36 would cost you somewhere around £226. It's barely been a month, but that'll actually now set you back somewhere around £390. Back in September, it was being sold for £79.
The bad news doesn’t stop there, though. As we covered yesterday, a new report from Newsis revealed that AMD and NVIDIA may be gearing up to raise the prices of their GPUs.
For context, the Steam Machine’s GPU is a semi-custom AMD RDNA3.
So, if RAM prices are already through the roof, and AMD is reportedly going to increase the price of their GPUs, where does that leave the Steam Machine? Not in a great spot. Obviously.
We don’t know the price of the Steam Machine. Valve has been tight-lipped about it so far. Perhaps that was a smart move on their behalf, considering what’s happened in the time between now and its announcement.
However, price isn’t the only issue here. In the case of RAM, it didn’t suddenly become more expensive to produce; the demand for it just became much, much higher.
The best-case scenario is that Valve has already procured all of the parts it needs to manufacture the first wave of Steam Machines. If that is the case, then hopefully they won’t sell the Steam Machine for a price in line with the current market, but rather for a price that’s in line with what they paid for at whatever point in time they procured said parts.
Even the best-case scenario comes with a potential downside, though. Sure, the first wave of Steam Machines wouldn’t be affected by RAM or GPU price hikes, but a potential second wave almost definitely would be.
I don’t want to inspire some sort of scalping scenario by saying this, but that could lead to reselling issues down the line. If Valve is only capable of producing one limited wave of Steam Machines, suddenly, we have a problem that scalpers could very easily take advantage of.
Admittedly, this is all very speculative on my behalf, but I think it’s fair to call it an educated guess at this point in time. We won’t know anything for sure until we get any kind of official update from Valve, but I think it would be smart to expect the worst for now.
Topics: Steam, Steam Machine, Valve, PC, News