Valve's Steam Machine, originally meant to be a somewhat affordable SFF console-PC hybrid, officially went on sale in mid-June at a rather alarming starting price of $1,049, as a result of the ongoing DRAM and storage crisis. One question that has repeatedly come up is how the value proposition of the Steam Machine would change if the price were to drop. In a recent interview with Digital Foundry, Valve has explained its stance on the Steam Machine pricing and its expectations for the future of the PC gaming hardware market.

Valve engineers, Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais explained that "there's no point for us to keep hardware at a higher price. It's meant to be an enabler of a stronger connection between people and their games," going on to comment that "the cheaper, the better," however, as Aldehayyat says, "it's hard for us to predict the future, but we're not optimistic it's going to happen soon," adding that "other people in the industry have said as much." Aldehayyat is referring to ongoing and future DRAM price hikes, which Microsoft recently predicted would continue to rise when it announced the upcoming August Xbox price increases.