The Steam Machine marks Valve’s long-awaited return to the console wars. It appears slick and sounds highly effective sufficient to play fashionable video games on respectable settings. However Valve is leaving the largest query of all unanswered: how a lot will it value? There’s no official price ticket but, although we do have some early clues that time to the Steam Machine being a minimum of $800 or extra.
Valve in all probability needs to attend till nearer to launch earlier than committing to a price ticket for each the 512GB and 2TB fashions. It wouldn’t need a repeat of what occurred to the Nintendo Swap 2 when President Trump torpedoed the Mario maker’s initial pre-order plans by saying large tariffs days earlier than they have been set to start. Valve is promising to disclose extra info in early 2026. However that doesn’t imply we’re utterly at midnight about how a lot the Steam Machine will value.
“Steam Machine’s pricing is comparable to a PC with similar specs,” Valve told The Verge when it requested it if would value greater than PS5 Professional. Designer Pierre-Loup Griffais elaborated a bit extra. “We intend for it to be positioned closer to the entry level of the PC space, but to be very competitive with a PC you could build yourself from parts,” he stated.
Based mostly on The Verge‘s napkin math, building a PC from off-the-shelf parts to match the Steam Machine’s specs would begin at round $800, but it surely wouldn’t get you anyplace near the lounge machine’s small, compact footprint. That will require spending nearer to $1,000, earlier than taking into consideration issues like storage. The PS5 Professional begins at $750 and comes with 2TB of storage, but it surely’s additionally benefitting from a large provide chain operation from an organization that’s been mass-manufacturing dwelling consoles for many years.
Valve needs the Steam Machine to be ‘as affordable as possible’
Nonetheless, it appears like Valve doesn’t simply need the Steam Machine to cater to present PC avid gamers who’re used to investing $1,500 and past in new rigs. Affordability additionally appears like a high precedence and there’s at all times the query of how a lot of the upfront value of the {hardware} Valve is prepared to eat on its finish. An even bigger Steam set up base in the end means extra individuals paying Valve a 30-percent fee on each sport they purchase.
“But we obviously also wanted to make the device affordable,” Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat told IGN “We understand that affordability is really important, so we kept that in mind and made sure that’s a device that’s going to be reachable for a lot of people.”
He continued, “The affordability piece you mentioned is one of the reasons why we think a Steam Machine makes a lot of sense right now. So it’s just something that we thought about every time we made a hardware decision, a feature decision, is to make sure that we keep it as approachable, as affordable as possible.”
Whether or not Valve can hold the Steam Machine pricing “console-level” will in the end decide whether or not it finally ends up feeling like a dear PC accent just like the ROG Xbox Ally X or an actual competitor within the broader console gaming house. It is also a bellwether indicating if the next-gen Xbox and PlayStation 6 keep within the realm of $500-$600 or begin pushing the barrier to entry even greater.
