The Steam Machine costs $1,049, and that's not entirely Valve's fault. The publisher had originally wanted its mini PC-console hybrid to be priced closer to the $789 Steam Deck, but ongoing component shortages swiftly killed that dream. Still, its engineers hope you're happy.
Engineer Yazan Aldehayyat tells Eurogamer in a new interview, "It's hard because I don't think we ever really had an official price or anything like that – I think we had some ideas – but it's really difficult to quantify it." He says the Steam Deck price serves as "a rough estimate" for Valve's original plans, but he nonetheless believes $1,049 is "a good value."
Aldehayyat explains, "It's still competitive with similarly specced machines, especially pre-built machines." That's a fair analysis – GamesRadar+ hardware editor Phil Hayton recently tried estimating a reasonable alternative to the diminutive Steam Machine that you could build yourself, and it still came out to $1,265 for a slightly chunkier, yet more powerful PC. Right now, no one is spared from RAM shortages caused by virulent AI data center development.
Steam Machine user interface designer Lawrence Yang muses, "I'm very curious to see how people react to the price." He, like anyone else who's bought a video game or bottle of Tylenol in the past few months, knows "all the prices are going up, things are going out of stock, something's happening to the point where everyone is impacted by it."
"I'm guessing that people – or hoping that people – will understand," Yang says.
"It is more expensive than we wanted it to be, for sure," he reiterates. "But we think that compared to what you could build with the same price, it is kind of commensurate, and we think that we're bringing something extra with the small form factor and all of the other stuff that we built into it."
I can only speak for myself: I understand why the Steam Machine costs over $1,000, or why rent for a one-bedroom in Brooklyn is more than $2,000, or why a plate of lobster spaghetti at a fancy restaurant is $48 when I'd rather just hunt the lobster myself for that price, but that doesn't mean I like it. Am I supposed to?
Valve says Steam Machine is $1,049 because it "doesn't align with our beliefs" to subsidize the cost.
