Valve has now confirmed our worst fears: all of the Steam hardware—Steam Machine, Steam Frame VR headset, and Steam Controller—it announced in November is delayed by a few months because of the creeping influence of the ongoing memory shortage.
In a post on the official Steam Hardware Blog, Valve said it needs to “revisit” pricing for all three devices, especially the Steam Machine hybrid PC/console and Steam Frame VR headset. Alas, “the limited availability and growing prices of these critical components,” namely RAM and SSD storage, have rapidly increased from only a few months ago. The company still promises to ship in the first half of the year. AMD CEO Lisa Su also confirmed the Steam Machine would arrive early this year.
Valve’s new Steam Controller shouldn’t see a price increase, though it will likely cost the equivalent of other high-end controllers. © Valve
This news shouldn’t come as a shock if you’ve been following the rapid price fluctuations of practically all PC components that use memory. Modern high-end DRAM (dynamic random access memory) now costs 500% more than it did a few months ago, in some cases. SSDs, aka solid-state drives, have seen prices increase regularly since the start of the year. The memory issue has also impacted the discrete GPU market, especially Nvidia’s latest 50-series graphics cards.
“Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed,” the company wrote in its blog post. “But we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change.”
There’s still no specific price or shipping date
The Steam Frame VR headset and Steam Machine both rely on 16GB of RAM, though that’s not accounting for the price of the iGPU’s VRAM. © Valve
Valve has only hinted at a possible price, telling some outlets it would position the Steam Machine close to the “entry-level PC space.” That would have indicated a price of around $700 or even $800, at least. As for performance, Valve reiterated in its blog post that the Steam Machine should be able to handle “the majority of Steam titles” at 4K and 60 fps while relying on AMD’s FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) upscaling technology. This wouldn’t be the fabled FSR Redstone, unfortunately, since the “semi-custom” AMD chip on the Steam Machine is based on the RDNA 3.5 GPU microarchitecture, rather than the more recent RDNA 4. Some games may run better if you push FSR to render games at a 1080p resolution before bringing it to 4K.
Meanwhile, a 5-year-old Sony PlayStation 5 console now costs $500 without the disc drive. In its latest quarterly earnings report, Sony indicated it may be able to wait out the first year of the RAM shortage. Sony’s chief financial officer, Lin Tao, said the company was “already in a position” to secure the necessary RAM needed to last through the 2026 holiday season. Tao added that “we intend to minimize the impact of the increased memory cost on this segment going forward.”
The benefit of a Steam Machine over a traditional console is the customizability. You will be able to replace the RAM and SSD, though the big improvement will be access to a wide SteamOS development community allowing players to install non-Steam games, mods, and emulators without much fuss. The benefit of having dedicated hardware means Valve can work to increase performance across all systems. In its FAQ, Valve said, “We are working on HDMI VRR, investigating improved upscaling, and optimizing ray tracing performance in the driver.”
As long as Valve can promise a minimum acceptable performance for most modern games, the Steam Machine may still make more sense to prospective gaming PC buyers as a cheaper alternative to buying over-inflated PC components. Knowing the skyrocketing price of RAM, the everyday console buyer may find Valve’s 6 x 6-inch gaming machine is still out of reach.
