With Valve having announced price hike for the Steam Deck OLED citing “rising memory and storage costs”, it looks like the Steam Machine is going to be more expensive than people originally thought. According to known leaker Brad Lynch, internal price estimates at Valve had it at even higher than modern Steam Deck prices.
He also made a note that these estimates were from two months ago. With the prices of memory and storage having only gone up since then, this likely means that the Steam Machine will in turn be much more expensive despite its mid-range CPU and GPU specs.
“Take this with a grain of salt, because it was just whispers in my ear, but back when I was told a figure for what Valve’s estimated price they’d have to set the starting price of Steam Machine, it was still higher than today’s Steam Deck prices,” he wrote. “And that was 2 months ago.”
Responding to another social media user about whether the price hikes for the Steam Deck have been made to allow Valve to eat some losses by selling the Steam Machine for cheaper, Lynch responded by saying that, while he doesn’t know, he doubts that this might be the case.
This leak follows a report from last month that had indicated that the price for the Steam Machine has been heavily impacted by storage and memory prices. Speaking to Polygon about the then-recent Steam Controller launch, hardware engineer Steve Cardinali noted that the controller was released because it “doesn’t have RAM in it, and it’s not as complicated to start getting out the door for us.”
At the time, Lynch had noted that there has been quite a big jump in Valve’s internal prices for the Steam Machine before and after the price of RAM. “I’ve been told some Valve internal pricing targets they had before AND after RAM skyrocketed,” he wrote. “Machine is affected the most. Frame is not as bad.”
Valve hasn’t yet announced an official launch date for the Steam Machine, and while the company had mentioned that it wants to ship it, along with the Steam Controller and the Steam Frame, in the first half of 2026, that window is quickly slipping by.
“Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed,” explained Valve in February. “But we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change. We will keep you updated as much as we can as we finalize those plans as soon as possible.”
In March, the company reaffirmed its plans to ship “all three products this year.” However, due to the ongoing memory shortages, the company has only recently been able to ship one of the products—Steam Controller. In the meantime, the company is still working on its launch plans, and will share more details as those plans are finalized.