The Steam Machine might remind you of a console—it's a cute little box instead of a monolith of noisy fans, it's well-suited to play on a TV, and you don't have to build the damn thing yourself. It's like the Steam Deck in that way, but it might cost quite a bit more than Valve's celebrated handheld, as Valve coder Pierre-Loup Griffais confirmed on the Friends Per Second podcast.
"If you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at," Griffais said on the podcast. "Ideally, we'd be pretty competitive with that and have a pretty good deal, but we're working on refining that as we speak. Right now is just a hard time to have a really good idea of what the price is gonna be."
When asked if the Steam Machine would be subsidized like a console, which tend go for around $450-600 USD these days, Griffais said no. That isn't to say the device will necessarily be priced like a prebuilt PC, though. As he continued on the podcast: "Obviously our goal is for it to be a good deal at that level of performance, and then, you have features that are actually really hard to build if you're making your own gaming PC from parts." Examples he gave were the Machine's small size, ability to interface with a TV remote and be turned on by the controller, and its low noise level.
"Being able to sit down on your couch, press one button on your controller and the whole thing lights up like you'd expect for a thing that's in your living room, I think that's very valuable," Griffais said on the podcast. "There's not really a price point to that, because it's not really something that exists in the PC market right now."
It sounds like it may be more expensive than we predicted. When hardware managing editor Jacob Ridley tallied up the guesses from the PC Gamer team, the average estimation came to $525—cheaper than a Playstation 5 with the disc drive, and less than a hundred dollars more than a Nintendo Switch 2. That said, the Steam Deck is undeniably a bargain given its form factor and performance, so maybe Valve's definition of a "good deal" involves taking the price somewhere in that ballpark.
It's all speculation at this juncture, and this new note from Valve is more of a vibe shift than anything concrete. But as Jacob noted in the above article, the appeal of this device depends largely on its price tag given that it is, at the end of the day, a midrange PC in a novel package: "You can get an RTX 5060 build for like, $750–$800, so Valve can't go much higher without dooming the Steam Machine concept to another 10 years in purgatory."
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