Valve’s Steam Machine finally has a price: a whopping $1,049 for the 512GB configuration or $1,349 for the 2TB version. And those are without bundled controllers, which drive up the cost more.
The prices are so high in part because Valve isn’t subsidizing the hardware, and the company has already indicated that the component crisis forced it to reconsider its initial pricing plans. In an interview with the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, Valve engineers discussed the reality of sourcing RAM in 2026, with take-it-or-leave-it prices as memory and other components remain in short supply, from only a few vendors like Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix.
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Valve, of course, isn’t the only company in a bind over memory shortages, as the crunch is forcing many hardware makers to make significant pricing changes. Even Apple CEO Tim Cook is warning of incoming price hikes for iPhones, Macs, and other devices. And the RAM crunch isn’t projected to get better anytime soon.
Not only that but they’re dealing with another legal headache claiming they’re a monopoly which is part of why they aren’t subsidizing it. One of the staff members did say they’re considering selling them with RAM/SSDs which if they do will significantly reduce the price.
Seeing the LTT video where they build their own PC with similar parts (but slightly better) for the same price was really the nail in the coffin for this one. The performance of the SMachine makes the value proposition… lackluster.
The only redeeming quality is the form factor. Would definitely fit very well in a living room. Would it make a good couch party game machine ?
The form factor is a big factor though. Some people don’t want or can’t afford the space a giant metal box takes up.
So we thought we’d just kick it to the customers
And the RAM crunch isn’t projected to get better anytime soon.
Projections by whom? What timeframe does “soon” cover?
With increasing objections, blocking, and cancellations of data centers, and some big-name AI companies going public soonish, and the recent OpenAPI finance press… it could be “soon”, within a few months, that it could get better. It’s certainly not a certainty, maybe even unlikely, and can’t be “projected” from the current RAM market alone, but if you want to hope…
That’s why I buy used, much easier to negotiate. I’m not really a Dodge guy though, and I don’t need a big truck anyway.
Har har. It’s not dodge anymore
I feel sorry for them for the team that designed this. They had all this shit ready to go and then the RAM and SSD prices went through the roof, and tbh if you’re speccing a machine for mass production, those seem like the bits that were always gonna be cheaper by the time it comes to actually building it. Why would they ever go up? They never have before.
It was a nice idea, but the timing had completely fucked it. I don’t think it was ever going to compete with the PS5 on price, but right now it’s barely even competing with PC on price…
Even the Steam Deck isn’t competitive any more.
This is what shows in Steam when you search for it.
This is all you can buy.
Its always rough when you are dealing with a cartel…
I love how many people are really trying to suck the cartel’s toes in the comments here.
The “UMM ACTUALLYS” are off the charts and stupid.
They must be Nintendo fans too.
I mean sure, but this is a plain supply and demand issue.
Saying “supply and demand” as if that settles the issue is reductive. It tells us prices moved, not why the market is structured this way. The real questions are what’s driving demand, who controls supply, and how concentrated power has become. When three suppliers and a handful of effectively unlimited buyers dominate the entire market, with weak or absent regulatory intervention, Econ 101 stops being analysis and starts becoming a thought-terminating cliché.
I’m not sure why you are getting down votes.
The reasons fur the demand sick, but you are correct, demand is fast outstripping supply… Price rises are inevitable.
Not my downvote, but I get it. The AI cartel bought out the RAM manufacturers. The “AI circle” of companies is definately fucking over the market and not just in ways that lead to them getting their job done. They didn’t just stop making ram. They slowed it wayyy down, causing prices to skyrocket. They will likely make tons of money from the AI memory towers on orders for datacenters that might not even be allowed to exist, but they’re certainly making multiple times more money on their old lines producing the same product they always have.
Yeah, the cartel comment implies price fixing or a monopoly or something, which really isn’t the case. This is really clearly a case of demand going through the roof (for entirely stupid and irresponsible reasons) and supply not being able to meet it.
But that’s what I get for using critical thinking amongst a mob, this is on me.
Demand going the roof would be normal.
One company (openAI) to prepurchase all of the next years ram before even produced and you double the prices only from that is a cartel move.
And maybe is the worst to this date, with prices 4x or 5x, but in the past the cartel had other ways to raise prices 2x (2016 was last time for who remember).
Hey, I wouldn’t disagree with that for the most part. But I would still say this is mostly an example of supply and demand.
When supply is so limited that you probably won’t be able to acquire all of a resource that you need, it’s perfectly rational to attempt to secure as much as you can from the next batch, even if that means prepaying to ensure your access.
Now if that buyer is offering higher prices to secure the resource, it’s also perfectly rational for the manufacturer to sell it to them.
We’re going to continue to have this problem as long as that relationship remains the same. No legislation or trade deal or tariff or is going to make a meaningful difference. The only way to solve this situation is to increase supply or decrease demand. Well, I suppose you could outlaw LLM training in every country on earth, but good luck with that.
It can be both. The three RAM manufactures (Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix) have a historical record of price fixing and collusion (I believe Gamers Nexus has some excellent reporting on this). It isn’t just supply and demand, it’s that three sketchiest companies have the world over a barrel and may well be using the demand spike to keep prices (artificially) high with the knowledge that nobody else can enter the market and that it takes YEARS and a truly ridiculous amount of money to scale up production to increase supply.
Damn the verge now just quotes GN? They may as well just link their video without writing anything, lol. They added nothing to this article.
Not that I can read much of it because of the paywall.
If you click “read mode” (im on librewolf but any firefox fork will do) you can access the whole article just fine.
Ohh that’s neat!
paywall
Probably doesn’t help in this case, but check out Bypass Paywalls Clean :)
thanks it’s a bit weird to install but I’ll get it done, I always wanted one that works after 5ftladder stopped working
Doesn’t work on every site, but 13ft ladder is a self hostable replacement
I prefer Bypass Paywalls Dirty 😈
Just wait until there is a rice and wheat shortage. These negotiations are child’s play compared to mass death from starvation due to global political instability. But yeah…RAM.
From 12:48 of the video:
Gamers Nexus: “Were you able to lock in contracts for memory with the suppliers directly or did you have to jump through a bunch of hoops or…”
Rep from Valve: “Look there’s no contract, there’s nothing. Those guys…they are…they give us a price every month, and they say ‘you can buy that many’, and it’s yes or no, and if we say no then they never talk to us again”.
Gamers Nexus also links another video they made specifically about the DRAM cartel.
Actual fucking cartel.
Yes, the current tech industry has made computer hardware into drugs. It’s a sellers market and the buyers that are ordering the largest amounts at the highest prices are AI and data center companies, everyone else gets the left overs at even higher prices.
The prices are also so high because Valve is a for profit company and the ceo owns an entire fleet of mega yachts
With the current hardware prices there isn’t much profit to gain here.
The main difference to other consoles is that they don’t sell at a loss to keep you in their ecosystem like PlayStation and Nintendo do. Valve could afford the cheap prices of the steam deck since its a bit tricky to use as a normal PC, but the steam machine is literally just a PC, selling it at a loss would be stupid for them.
With the current hardware prices there isn’t much profit to gain here.
Valve is a for profit company, they sell their products at the highest price the can get away with.
Not particularly. Steam gets 30% back on all game sales, so if they can make sure the steam machine gets only to people with established steam accounts, then they’re probably coming out ahead.
That’s… pretty much my point.
For the steam deck where 99% of people will use it with steam, selling at a loss is acceptable, so they do it.
The steam machine is just a pc, so they can’t make sure that people use steam, hence the normal market price.
I’m pretty sure the person you’re responding to is referring to the fact that in order to buy the steam machine you have to have a steam account in good standing of a certain age. I guess that does not necessarily ensure that the end user will be a big gamer, but it certainly helps.
I’m not suggesting it makes sense to sell it a loss, just providing that information in case people were not aware.
I hate micron so much now especially. They basically rug pull all consumers and only sell B2b now. So they can make more money on Ai datacenters.
Problem is there are only a few companies that even sell memory. And micron made it so much worse for the consumer market. I will not forgive, I will not forget.
I really hope China or someone else can step up and just flood the entire market with cheap components eventually.
They are trying. But there is a downside to everything. Once China has full function to basically replace the manufacturing of processors and memory in Taiwan they no longer have anything holding them back from bombing Taiwan into submission. And several incentives to do so to eliminate their competition.
Yes but giving up profits is not what a company does…
And you say forgive, as if they are your friend or something. Its a corporation. They don’t give a fuck about you as a person.
Almost all corporations doesn’t. There are exceptions. Kagi, the search engine, will give your monthly subscription money back if you didn’t search during the month. How cool is that. That’s someone who actually wants to provide a product users are happy with.
There are exceptions. Kagi, the search engine
They’re giving money to the homophobic brave search engine because it’s “just politics” and also give money to russian yandex despite their invasion into ukraine
https://mastodon.social/@scy@chaos.social/111704636602291316
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo/19
Alright. Now let’s talk about what Google is doing. :)
Pretty damn evil company if you ask me.
At some point, you realize that companies will always do things you don’t agree with, and you try to pick the lesser evil.
As for homophobic, i dont know if you mean same sex marriage? The bible clearly says:
Leviticus 18:22: You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.
So to Christian people, its not homophobic, it’s about their beliefs. Clearly religions will have things that you must not do, and this is one of those for Christianity.
Abortion is another hot topic. There are many of these that are not based on hate, but on belief systems. I really think it’s getting too much with calling everyone who doesn’t agree homophobic. It’s the new conspiracy theorist. :)
if you’re a bigot because you think sky daddy told you to be, that doesn’t somehow make you not a bigot
Bigot - a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from his own.
How are you not a bigot with the statement above?
Because they’re not saying you can’t have that opinion, just that you are bigoted for having that opinion.
Hope that helps you! 😊
Yes. We are both biggots. And I think everyone is, looking at that definition.
Only very mature people are tolerant of opinions they dont agree with. Depends of course on what does tolerant mean? If you argue against it, are you tolerant?
I let a lot of people here have their weird opinions. :)
Is this a Kagi ad lmao
Ngl relatable, I too often mention my interests out of place.
But it’s not out of context. Rather it, merely has an existence in which the distance between in-context and out-of-context disappears, and the topic exist as neither related nor unconnected. A bona fide symphrantasia if you will.
In my commenting career I often make niche, anime poetry references, and searching for them based on the few words I remember can be hard; and that’s why I use kagi, the not-google search engine, start your free trial for 100 searches per month today or upgrade to infinite searches for only $10/month from link below.
symphrantasia
i like your words, magic dude
It’s fine in my opinion. I mention stuff I like and will keep doing that. :)
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They still sell consumer memory IIRC, just not their own brand. They’ll make DDR5 for others at inflated prices though.
This all so people can rot their brains out to fruit videos…
fruit videos? is there a recent trend I missed?
Godawful AI generated soap opera featuring anthropomorphic fruits.
insert veggie tales meme about the future being AI generated
And so companies can fire the people who do the work (and hire them back later to fix the damage done by the agentic AI), too. Don’t forget that part.
Hire them back at a lower pay none the less. People will and are desperate for work, so it won’t be difficult.
They don’t realize that they drive away customers to upcoming competitors long-term? Only short-term grift in view?
So like… genuine question: what do you propose they do? Operate at a loss indefinitely? Go into an industry they have zero experience and domain knowledge in and just “build a factory”? And industry, I should add, that is probably the single most complicated and technically - as well as capex - intensive industry that humans have thus far derived? What’s the play here? Drive themselves to bankruptcy out of altruism?
Two realistic options. One, depends if the devices are already manufactured. If yes, you sell them at the prices when you manufactured them. That shows good will for the community, and gets devices out and people wanting to buy in to a niche product.
If they haven’t manufactured the devices, then the answer is easy, you simply won’t be making them because they are too expensive to get a large run in until prices go down.
The bigger problem though is the old off the shelf hardware being used here is going to age out incredibly fast. So a third option would be what many of the minipc companies are doing, and give an option for barebones, and let you bring your own RAM and SSD. No option is perfect, but just raising prices higher than a PS5 Pro with no controller and worse performance, you aren’t winning over new customers, and you are pushing your old customers away.
At the same time, standing still and doing nothing is a recipe for someone else to eat their lunch.
My point is that Valve is fundamentally a for-profit company, not a charitable organization. Expecting them to do nothing in response to the wildest market disruptions that the consumer hardware industry has ever seen is frankly unrealistic.
At the end of the day, Valve has been successful because they have been able to balance strategic, long term profitability with providing a genuinely good service at a reasonable market price to the vast majority of their customers. Note that that is specifically not giving things away at cost (as nice as that might be in the short term for customers. In the long run, zero (or negative) profitability would mean Valve ceases to exist.
I’m not trying to suckle at the corporate teat here - I’m simply pointing out that pretending Valve isn’t a corporation is flat out delusional. Not to mention, everyone else’s prices are going to be spiking too. They’re not “the bad guys”, and they will absolutely not be the only ones doing it.
I mean, Valve has been successful solely because they have cornered the game distribution market. Their hardware has done essentially zero for their bottom line. They could have simply never release this product (as they didn’t for the original Steam Machine) in a realistic sense, and been done with it.
Their hardware (pointedly, the steam deck) has begun a diametric shift towards Linux gaming. The fact that our fuckwit Captains of Industry are pinning the throttle and driving at a wall, and in the process gutting the consumer electronics market is, ultimately, just really awful luck and timing. If it weren’t for that, I dare say Valve would be looking at becoming a Serious Player in the hardware market. As it stands, this will certainly significantly stymie the adoption of the GabeCube… but I hope that ultimately, when the market stabilized (or corrects) in time, they’ll still be on track to do that.
This way they can rent put computer instead of you owning the means to do so yourself. This is what happens when you price out consumers. You bind them to your terms with leverage to pay for your past Investments payed by future earnings.
I mean, how long does a consumer CPU last? 10 years? 15? Datacenter measures don’t count, since they always push 100% load at max feasible temperature. And RAM holds even longer. And DDR3 is good enough for general computing, even with all the bloat.
Yeah, the weakness of the “this is all a massive conspiracy to force consumers to rent all their computing power” theory is that old computers work just fine as long as you don’t try and install a newer Windows.
We’re maybe 2 decades past the point were you had to upgrade your PC every 5 years for it to be suitable for everyday computing usage. There are only two things pushing PC hardware upgrades nowadays:
- OS support time limits and the ever expanding bloat of newer OS versions (which is nowhere as much a problem if your OS is Linux)
- Games
Now, for Games, all attempts at getting gamers to have their games hosted in servers and playing on light PCs - most notably Stadia - failed miserably.
As for OS, how successful has Microsoft been at getting people to actually upgrade to Windows 11, especially since hardware prices shot up?
I think it’s far more likely that people just keep on using their aged hardware more often than not with no longer updated OS versions, than it is for them to actually start paying subscriptions to use remote computing power to browse the web and read their e-mails, especially since that still needs some form of local hardware so doesn’t totally solve their problem with expensive hardware.
I am gaming on ddr4 RAM and an rtx2070 from 2015. However CPU loads are high running a lot of games. I got a few friends who want to upgrade their motherboard but can not reasonably afford ddr5. Most of my non-gaming acquaintances do not own anything more than a phone or tablet anymore.
The RTX 2070 came out in late 2018 though
It takes a minimum of about 3 years to set up chip factories and longer to ramp up production, so it’s likely they think of this as a problem for the next CEO.
That’s not even the issue, it simply isn’t worth it for chip manufactors to ramp up production.
Chip manufacturing is so expensive that machines have to run at 100% capacity to make reasonable profit margins from consumer hardware. Investment in new factories is only worth it if the demand stays high for 10+ years, which simply doesn’t seem to be the case. Most AI companies will collapse in the next few years and while AI in itself will probably survive, the hardware craze will eventually die down a bit.
Holy moly, we’ve raised a generation of idiot leaders.
Yes but how’s that something for Valve to solve (I am a bit lost to this thread’s train of thought)
Off-topic
After reporting how much the Steam Machine costs, I could tell already. RAM manufacturers are in paradise right now!
Have you seen what their stocks are doing?
The all experienced exponential growth somehow.
Samsung went from a stock being 200-300€ per share to 5000€ per share in less than a year.I can’t wait for the bubble to pop.
There’s going to be a bloodbath when the AI bubble finishes popping.
