“They were targeting 2028 [as far as I know], but the whole RAM/NAND situation could delay it,” wrote KeplerL2. “Also, since they don’t have a semi-custom SoC, unlike the PS6/Xbox, if it gets delayed, it could end up with better specs.”

Since its launch in February 2022, the Steam Deck has proven to be quite successful for Valve, and recent trends in memory prices have even left the company to deal with greater demand than it can supply.

The handheld features a quad-core AMD CPU running on Zen 2 architecture with 8 threads, a clock speed of between 2.4 GHz and 3.5 GHz, depending on the software. It’s paired with an RDNA 2-based GPU with eight compute units clocked between 1 and 1.6 GHz, and 16 GB of unified LPDDR5 memory either clocked at 5500 MT/s or 6400 MT/s, depending on whether you have the LCD or OLED version of the Steam Deck.

Valve’s thoughts on making a new version of the Steam Deck have largely revolved around the company waiting for a major generational jump for hardware, not just in terms of raw specs but also energy efficiency. In October 2024, Valve designer Lawrence Yang said there was no reason to work on yearly iterations of the handheld.

“It is important to us, and we’ve tried to be really clear, we are not doing the yearly cadence. We’re not going to do a bump every year. There’s no reason to do that. And, honestly, from our perspective, that’s kind of not really fair to your customers to come out with something so soon that’s only incrementally better. So we really do want to wait for a generational leap in compute without sacrificing battery life before we ship the real second generation of Steam Deck. But it is something that we’re excited about, and we’re working on.”

In more recent times, the company has had its hands full with trying to launch the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and new Steam Controller, which were unveiled back in November 2025. While there hasn’t yet been any solid launch window announced for the three products, the company is still trying to release them in 2026, and that “More updates will be shared as we finalize our plans.” Hardware delays have largely been blamed on memory and storage shortages.

Valve noted that the attorney general had first reached out to the company in early 2023 where it had made similar comparisons. The studio also said that its players “don’t have to open mystery boxes” in order to play its games. “In fact, most of you don’t open any boxes at all and just play the games—because the items in the boxes are purely cosmetic, there is no disadvantage to a player not spending money.”

As for the lawsuit itself, Valve has said that it has “serious concerns” about the changes the New York attorney general wants the company to make to its games. Among these changes is making loot boxes and their contents non-transferrable.

“We think the transferability of a digital game item is good for consumers—it gives a user the ability to sell or trade an old or unwanted item for something else, in the same way an owner can sell or trade a tangible item like a Pokemon or baseball card. NYAG proposes to take away users’ ability to transfer their digital items from Valve games. Transferability is a right we believe should not be taken away, and we refuse to do that.”

The company has also called out the attorney general’s proposal to gather “additional information” on each one of the players “on the off-chance someone in New York was anonymizing their location to appear outside of New York, such as by using a VPN.” This could lead Valve to implement invasive technologies for the purposes of this data collection, which would include age verification, despite payment processors already having age verification built into their systems.

“We respect New York’s right to determine the laws governing behavior in the state. We will of course comply if the New York legislature passes laws governing mystery boxes—something it has not done despite considering the issue a few times,” wrote the company. “Such laws would be the result of a public process, presumably with input from the industry and New York gamers. The type of commitments the NYAG demanded from Valve went far beyond what existing New York law requires and even beyond New York itself. It may have been easier and cheaper for Valve to make a deal with the NYAG, but we believed the type of deal that would satisfy the NYAG would have been bad for users and other game developers, and impacted our ability to innovate in game design.”

As for the attorney general’s comments attempting to draw correlations between video games, violence in the real world, and the effect this might have on children, Valve has said that they serve as “a distraction and a mischaracterization we’ve all heard before.” Closing things out, the company makes a note of “many studies” highlighting the “beneficial impact” that games have on their players, and that it will ultimately wait for a court’s decision on the matter rather than trying to settle with the state of New York.

A game must run at 1080p and 30 FPS to be verified for the Steam Machine, just as it does on a Steam Deck. That comes straight from Valve at GDC 2026. That doesn’t mean the upcoming gaming device from Valve is incapable of going higher than those numbers, but it is the minimum a game needs if it aims to be verified for the platform.

The Steam Frame is a tad more demanding if you’re going to be running your titles off its native chip, with a 90 FOS requirement for VR titles. 2D titles only need 30 FPS at 720p, though. There was also talk about offline mode for games right off the bat, optimizing titles for lower-specced machines, and improving controller support, all of which was advice aimed at developers looking to release titles on SteamOS.

We’re looking forward to getting our hands on the upcoming Steam Machine and Steam Frame, and we think we’re not alone in our excitement to check out Valve’s way of taking the fight to the PlayStation and Xbox in the near future.

However, in a Steamworks Development post, Valve said it would be shipping “all three products this year. More updates will be shared as we finalize our plans.” Memory shortages were once again to blame, but it seems that storage is also in short supply – a knock-on effect caused by the former.

While this doesn’t necessarily mean a delay past the first half of 2026, Valve’s wording feels very deliberate here. Regardless, the shortages don’t appear to be going away anytime soon, so you have to wonder if the new Steam Hardware will even launch this year. Time will tell.

Perhaps the most disheartening part of all this is that the long-rumored Half-Life 3 was allegedly slated to launch with the new Steam Machine. It was reportedly planned for Spring 2026, likely to coincide with the initial release date. Regardless of whether this is true or not, journalists like Insider-Gaming’s Mike Straw claim that the sequel, arguably the most anticipated of all time, is indeed real.

There haven’t been too many rumors lately, though, so stay tuned for updates.

In South Korea, the 512 GB model will be priced at ₩898,000, and the 1 TB model at ₩1,048,000. Taiwan will see prices raised to NT$18,980 for the 512 GB model and NT$22,480 for the 1 TB model. Currently, no price hikes are planned for Hong Kong.

The announcement came from Komodo Station—the company in charge of selling the Steam Deck in the Asian markets. And while no explicit reason has been noted, it comes in light of “rising logistics costs that have continued since the [Steam Deck]’s launch, as well as recent fluctuations in the exchange rate environment,” according to the report (via machine translation).

Back in February, Valve had started issuing a warning on the official listing for the Steam Deck OLED. The company also confirmed that production on the Steam Deck LCD 256 GB had been stopped, with any available units being leftover stock.

“Steam Deck OLED may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages,” wrote Valve. “Steam Deck LCD 256GB is no longer in production, and once sold out, will no longer be available.”

Valve has been seeing many of its hardware plans affected by global memory shortages. The company confirmed that its plans to launch the Steam Machine, the Steam Frame, and the new Steam Controller had been pushed back, with the new release window being the first half of 2026.

“Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed,” explained the company. “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 the meantime, Sony is also seeing adverse effects of the RAM shortage, with a report from last month indicating that the company might push the launch of the PS6 back as far as 2029. Nintendo is also reportedly keeping an eye on memory prices, with a price hike possibly coming later in the year. Neither company has made any statements, however.

Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa had spoken about keeping an eye on market conditions like memory shortages and trade tariffs back in January. At the time, he said, “We aim to address this by advancing component procurement over the medium to long term.”

“In Valve’s most popular game, the process resembles a slot machine, with an animated spinning wheel that eventually rests on a selected item. The randomly selected virtual items have no in-game functionality but can be sold online for money, with one item reportedly being sold for more than $1 million.”

The lawsuit alleges that, through this promotion, Valve has earned “billions of dollars” by luring players to engage with gambling in the hopes of winning these items.

“Illegal gambling can be harmful and lead to serious addiction problems, especially for our young people,” said James. “Valve has made billions of dollars by letting children and adults alike illegally gamble for the chance to win valuable virtual prizes. These features are addictive, harmful, and illegal, and my office is suing to stop Valve’s illegal conduct and protect New Yorkers.”

Aside from the monetary value of the items, the crux of the lawsuit seems to revolve around Valve’s use of loot boxes, which the press release compares with slot machines due to the random nature of the rewards. The nature of the loot boxes also results in some items being rarer than others, which in turn has the added effect of making them more valuable in the market.

The fact that third-party markets also exist, making it easier to liquidate money that would have otherwise remained in the Steam ecosystem, is also a major cause for concern. “Users can also connect their Valve accounts to third-party marketplaces where the virtual items can then be sold directly for cash. The [Office of the Attorney General]’s investigation found that Valve facilitates and even assists these third-party marketplaces in their operations.”

“The high value of Counter-Strike’s rare skins and the ease of liquidating items through third-party marketplaces have made Valve’s virtual items an attractive target for thieves. Valve has received hundreds of thousands of support requests from users reporting that their Steam accounts had been hacked, or that they had been tricked into transferring items to a bad actor.”

There is also a focus on how Valve’s loot boxes adversely affect children. James has noted that they can entice younger players into gambling their limited funds because the loot boxes have the potential to offer lucrative rewards.

While the press release hasn’t confirmed what kinds of damages or penalties James is seeking from Valve through this lawsuit, it has noted that she wants to “permanently stop Valve from promoting gambling features in its games,” while also divesting itself of its “ill-got gains”, and pay fines for the violation of New York’s laws.

“Steam Deck OLED may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages,” wrote Valve on the official Steam listing for the Steam Deck. “Steam Deck LCD 256GB is no longer in production, and once sold out, will no longer be available.”

The company had previously spoken about memory shortages affecting its hardware line-up earlier this month. Without revealing too many details about its previous and current plans, Valve said that shortages in memory had caused it to “revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing.” While there’s no new launch date, Valve has noted that it plans to release the Steam Machine, Steam Frame and new Steam Controller in the first half of 2026.

“Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed,” explained Valve. “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.”

While this current memory shortage may affect the Steam Deck for the short term, it might even have a further-reaching impact on the company’s R&D efforts for the handheld system’s successor. However, it is worth noting that Valve has been clear about having no current plans for a Steam Deck 2.

In an interview about how the Steam Deck helped pave the way for the Steam Machine, software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais spoke about how nothing in the current market matches Valve’s needs for a potential Steam Deck successor, at least for now.

“We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50% more performance at the same battery life,” he explained. “We want something a little bit more demarcated than that. So we’ve been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there’s no offerings in that landscape, in the SOC landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck.”

In the meantime, recent rumors have indicated that Sony might end up pushing the PS6’s launch to 2028 or 2029 due to inflating RAM prices.

“Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed,” explained Valve. “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.”

Further in the post, Valve has also offered more details about the Steam Machine and Steam Frame through an FAQ-like structure. Through this, the company has confirmed that streaming services outside of Steam’s Remote Play will be supported thanks to the latter’s built-in web browser. The VR headset also won’t have out-of-the-box support for the Valve Index’s lighthouse base station for more advanced player tracking. However, the modular and extensible software design of the Steam Frame will allow for users to come up with their own third-party solutions to bring in new compatibility features.

As for the Steam Machine, Valve has confirmed that it will be sharing faceplate CAD files, specs and details to ensure that third-party companies will also be able to make their own custom faceplates for the pre-built PC. The company has also noted that its RAM—DDR5 SODIMMs—and SSD—NVMe 2230 or 2280—will be accessible and fully upgradeable.

Valve’s announcement comes just a day after AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su had announced during an earnings call that the Steam Machine is on track to be launched “early this year”. In a statement. Dr. Su also projected a double-digit percentage loss for its semi-custom SoC (system-on-a-chip) business owing to the current console generation still going strong.

“In gaming, revenue increased 50% year-over-year to $843 million. Semi-custom sales increased year-over-year and declined sequentially as expected,” she said. “For 2026, we expect semi-custom SoC annual revenue to decline by a significant double-digit percentage as we enter the seventh year of what has been a very strong console cycle. From a product standpoint, Valve is on track to begin shipping its AMD-powered Steam Machine early this year.”

While Valve has been rather quiet about its pricing strategy for the Steam Machine, the company had confirmed back in November that the pre-built PC’s cost will be competitive with similarly-specced custom PCs. “I think 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,” said Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais in November.

For more on the Steam Machine, Steam Frame and new Steam Controller, here is everything you need to know.

“In gaming, revenue increased 50% year-over-year to $843 million. Semi-custom sales increased year-over-year and declined sequentially as expected,” said Dr. Su (via IGN). “For 2026, we expect semi-custom SoC annual revenue to decline by a significant double-digit percentage as we enter the seventh year of what has been a very strong console cycle. From a product standpoint, Valve is on track to begin shipping its AMD-powered Steam Machine early this year.”

Valve’s Steam Machines have been highly anticipated for how disruptive it will be in the market. Among many other issues, the global memory shortage has meant that building a new gaming PC has become an expensive concept due to the high prices of DDR5 RAM. Along with this, its use of the Arch Linux-based SteamOS has also been seen as having major implications, especially thanks to dissatisfaction in the current state of Windows 11. To top it all off, the Steam Machine is expected to have at least one major launch game: Half-Life 3. That last one comes courtesy of a rumor from back in December, which noted that Valve was initially aiming for a Spring 2026 launch. Soaring RAM prices, however, seemingly had a major role in changing these plans.

Despite all the excitement behind the Steam Machine, however, the pre-built PC isn’t expected to be priced competitively with PS5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles. Valve has remained quiet about its price tag, which has led to quite a bit of speculation revolving around its hardware specs and performance capabilities. According to Linus Media Group’s Linus Sebastian, however, his discussions with Valve’s engineers resulted in the room going silent when he brought up the potential of a $500 price tag.

“I can’t tell you what the price will be, because I literally don’t know,” said Sebastian on an episode of WAN Show. “When I said I’m disappointed it isn’t going to follow a console pricing model, where its subsided by the fact that manufacturer is going to be taking 30 percent of every game sold on it over the lifespan of this thing, because I feel that would be a more meaningful product, they asked what I meant by console price and I said $500. Nobody said anything, but the energy in the room wasn’t great.”

The Steam Machine was unveiled alongside VR headset Steam Frame and a new take on the Steam Controller. Valve has described the PC as running on an AMD Zen 4 six-core CPU at 4.8 GHz, a semi-custom AMD RDNA3 GPU with 28 compute units, 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM and a max sustained clock speed of 2.45 GHz, and 16 GB of DDR5 RAM. With these specs, Valve claims it can run games in 4K/60 FPS thanks to FSR.

The Steam Deck Verification program takes a number of things into account, including performance on the less-powerful hardware of the handheld system, as well as other aspects like the usability and readability of the UI on the smaller display, and whether or not it will manually require players to pull out the on-screen keyboard. The Steam Machine, in contrast, is a considerably more powerful system—referred to by Valve as being equivalent to six Steam Decks in its announcement video—and games will likely end up having an easier time running on it. Along with this, the Steam Machine also doesn’t have a tiny screen that UI and UX designers might have to account for, and keyboards are expected to be connected to it anyway since it is essentially a desktop PC.

Along with this, Yang also noted that a game being Steam Deck Verified also means that it is automatically Steam Machine Verified. “One easy rule of thumb is that if your title is Verified on Steam Deck, it will be Verified on Steam Machine,” he said. The major difference with Valve’s new set of hardware will end up being with the Steam Frame, which will likely have its own set of requirements that Yang has noted Valve will discuss with developers. He said that the company will “be going through the same rounds of testing and providing developer feedback,” as it does with its Verification program for the Steam Deck.

The Steam Machine was announced alongside the Steam Frame and the new Steam Controller in November. While the company hasn’t yet announced a launch date for the new products, it has been revealing quite a few details. Engineer Steve Cardinali, for instance, has revealed why the company went with a separate wireless protocol for the new Steam Controller to connect with a PC rather than Bluetooth.

“While Bluetooth is a great wireless connection method, we found in our testing that people’s home wireless environments and PC Bluetooth capabilities are highly variable (clogged networks, wireless interference, increased latency when using multiple BT devices, etc.),” said Cardinali, who went on to note that the new Steam Controller’s Puck “addresses these issues.”

“Another problem we set out to solve was the fact that dedicated wireless receivers that are plugged directly into the back of a PC near other USB ports can create interference issues. Adding the charging capability encourages people to leave the puck in a place where it’s likely to have minimal interference while providing a really easy charging experience,” he continued.

For more details on Valve’s new hardware, here is everything you need to know. Also check out rumours of the highly-anticipated Half-Life 3 apparently being a launch title for the Steam Machine.