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.
It’s weird how supply chains work, and how design changes are at the very start of a very long process that makes changing the design now a very costly, risky thing.
Not now. When RAM prices started skyrocketing. That wasn’t only today or yesterday.
It was still well after the hardware was designed.
Companies like Asus fart out new designs every year. It’s doable if the design pipeline if efficient enough.
What the other responders have said aside, are you seriously comparing a hardware focused company the size of Asus to Valve who’s hardware business is more of a side thing?
Key word: fart out
Not starting from scratch. Those are planned out years in advance.
Not everyone wants a mediocre upgrade.
Were you 100% certain this problem was going to last as long as it has? Yeah, neither was anyone else.
The Steam Machine uses semi-custom processors. Changing them would have required getting AMD to design new chips, not swapping out off-the-shelf parts. AMD doesn’t yet have an RDNA4 replacement for the GPU, so they would probably only go up to RDNA3.5, and that might not have been enough of a boost to even be worth the trouble.
Steam Machine uses old crap AMD had lying around. This is also why it’s not an APU design.
Literally on the Steam Machine page:
In the total project timeframe it takes to design and produce a machine, that is now.