The Steam Machine's price tag is already scarily expensive and downright unaffordable for your everyday player - starting at $1,049 for the cheapest 512GB model without a controller - but that eye-watering price is unlikely to come down anytime soon. Valve and, seemingly, the rest of the industry are bracing for the worst.
As AI data centres continue to swallow up memory chips and storage and a bunch of other components used in consumer devices, prices for PC gamers and hardware manufacturers have skyrocketed. Hence, the RAMageddon we're living through now. On the console side, prices have boomed and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma recently said she expects memory costs to double again before the fall of 2027. Lenovo also predicted we're in a new normal for RAM costs.
Valve isn't anymore optimistic about the RAM crisis calming down, either. Speaking to Bloomberg about the Steam Machine's lengthy development, Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat shared a pretty grim outlook about the near future.
"Honestly, it's still getting worse," Aldehayyat says about pricing. "Just in case people are not aware. What people are seeing on retail shelves right now, from our observations, is lagging what we're seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months." (Thanks for the spot, PCG!)
AI centres (that don't even exist yet) calling dibs on memory chips (that also don't exist yet) isn't just affecting pricing for the Steam Machine and consoles. Fellow Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais says the crisis is also impacting how many machines the company can even produce: "We're basically building everything we can. We're limited by memory capacity, for sure."
The rest of the interview with the Steam Machine engineers is just as insightful. Valve seemingly isn't too bothered about how many Steam Machines it can sell at the moment since the device is just another avenue to get people into open-source PC gaming and Valve's ecosystem, apparently.
