The new Steam Machine is pretty neat, but it’s walked a long and painful road to reach yesterday’s launch. A secret work-in-progress at Valve since at least 2023, it would be late 2025 before an initial public showing, and subsequent delays – blamed on industry-wide components shortages and the resultant price gouging – meant it that it when it did open for orders, it would be months later and at considerably greater expense than planned.

The volatility and unpredictability of the pricing situation may have conjured up images of a hopeful Valve crew, sat with crossed fingers atop a hoard of finished Steam Machines, ready to launch but holding back until production costs settle back down – allowing for a more enticing street price in turn. This, however, was never the case, as Steam Machine designer Lawrence Yang and engineer Yazan Aldehayyat told me over a video call last week.

Asked whether the Steam Machine was launching as soon as it was ready, or if there was some wishful thinking in the previously announced delay, Yang insists that Valve remained realistic about how long-term the components crisis will be. "For the most part, this is when we were able to complete all the things we needed to complete to ship it. We didn't delay for hope of... I'm guessing you're alluding to price?"

(Yes.)

"Like, it didn't look like things were going to change anytime soon," continues Yang, “in a way that would change things materially."

"Yeah, unfortunately, supply chains usually work on the orders of months and years," Aldehayyat adds. "So it's definitely not something that happens in a day or two or a week, unfortunately."

The existence of seemingly high-quality test units back in late 2025, the ones shown to travelling nerds like yours truly, also wasn’t an indication that production of the Steam Machine was very far along. In fact, at the time of those previews, Valve were apparently still building the factory for it.

"With any sort of high volume product like this, you have to build the machine, but then you also have to build the machine that builds the machine, and building the machine that builds the machine is actually, a lot of the time, way more work," Aldehayyat explains. "Things like setting up a production line, testers, doing production runs to dial in all the test criteria and test limits, all that kind of stuff takes a long time. So I think most of the time between November and now was spent on getting the factory producing at high efficiency, high yield."

"And then alongside that," Yang says, "working on firmware, and SteamOS and Steam updates, so that it would be a good experience out of the box."

Alas, while Valve eventually succeeded in building a production line, the Steam Machine’s third-party parts weren’t as forthcoming. Yesterday’s Steam blog post notes that there were "periods where we found we couldn't source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this has impacted the number of units we've been able to produce for launch."

Rather than holding back the supply of Steam Machines, then, it sounds like Valve have been struggling to amass their desired stock even after buying time with a publicised delay. Hence why it hasn’t really 'gone on sale,' as such: interested parties can sign up to reserve a Machine, and following a randomisation process to determine who stands where in the queue, will be notified when their order is ready to ship.