The new hardware lineup revealed by Valve in 2025—the Steam Controller, Steam Frame VR headset, and Steam Machine—made quite a first impression. The Steam Machine in particular came off as streamlined, simple, and very capable: A significant evolution over Valve's early Steam Machines that has the potential to finally bring livingroom PC gaming to the mainstream. Just two big questions remained: How much, and when?
That question is muddled by one big thing: The RAMpocalypse wrought by the headlong pursuit of AI, which has caused supply shortages and skyrocketing prices on memory, SSDs, and GPUs.
It's a chaotic state of affairs, and the uncertainty its caused may mean a longer wait for the new Steam kit than we expected: As recently as early February, Valve said all three products were expected to launch in the first half of this year, but now 2026 as a whole is starting to feel shaky.
"We hope to ship in 2026, but as we shared recently, memory and storage shortages have created challenges for us," Valve wrote in its 2025 Year in Review. "We'll share updates publicly when we finalize our plans!"
That linked post says Valve had expected to have pricing and release dates nailed down by now, "but the memory and storage shortages you've likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame)."
At that time, the plan to launch in the first half of 2026 had not changed, Valve added, "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."
Even if Valve is able to source the components it needs to build Steam Machines in quantities sufficient to meet demand—and that's a very big if—the costs are a real issue. Steam Machines will be more expensive than the consoles, because Valve has previously said that it won't subsidize the price like Sony and Microsoft do with the PlayStation and Xbox, but it at least needs them to be in the same ballpark if it wants a shot at widespread adoption.
Our hardware pros kicked around some thoughts on Steam Machine pricing in November 2025, but given how many years have gone by over the past few months, that feels almost irrelevant now. And with things not likely to get better anytime soon, I hate to say it but a push into 2027 is now looking like a real possibility.
