‘If we say no, then they never talk to us again.’
‘If we say no, then they never talk to us again.’
by
Photo: Kelsey McClellan / The Verge
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
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.
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?
Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais: Look, there’s no contracts. There’s nothing. Those guys… they give us a price every month or something 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.
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.
The supply situation is rough enough that Valve will be shipping Steam Machines with either one stick of 16GB of RAM or two sticks of 8GB of RAM. How many sticks come inside a given Steam Machine depends “on the supply that we can secure,” Griffais says. According to Gamers Nexus, “dual channel will objectively perform better than single channel,” but Valve’s Yazan Aldehayyat says that in the company’s tests, having one stick or two doesn’t make “any measurable difference” while playing games.
Valve hasn’t shared its original planned price for the Steam Machine. But the recent price increases to the Steam Deck OLED — up $240 for the 512GB version, and up $300 for the 1TB version — “should give you a ballpark estimate of how much the Steam Machine’s target had moved,” according to an Aftermath interview with Valve. Subtracting those same price hikes from the current Steam Machine prices nets out at theoretical original prices of $809 for the 512GB model and $1,049 for the 2TB model. Those prices are still high, but not as tough to swallow as what Valve officially revealed today.
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