Valve's will still try to find a way to price Steam Machine competitively, but the company also knows that it won't be an easy feat to pull off while AI data centers have a chokehold on RAM and socioeconomic factors keep making affordable products a rarer occurrence.
Asked in a PC Gamer interview about how the state of the industry affected the Steam Controller, launching this month for $99, hardware designer Lawrence Yang says he's "not the expert on this" but knows the price of the accessory "has gone up from where we originally wanted it to be." And the product is only able to ship this soon because it doesn't have RAM in it, of course.
"There is some variance across regions so, depending on where a customer is gonna buy it because of imports and tariffs and duties, etcetera, the price is gonna vary depending on where you're purchasing it," Yang adds. "That is something that has changed a bit over time, too."
The conversation then turned to how those same factors might affect the price of the Steam Machine, the company's upcoming gaming computer that looks to offer a few console comforts.
"I mean, obviously, we're bummed that this is the state of things," Yang says. "At the very least, we're not the only ones in this boat. Everyone's kind of figuring out how to overcome these obstacles and challenges, you know, RAM shortages, memory shortages, price hikes, everything. It's unavoidable that it will impact basically anything we make that has any of those parts in them."
Despite the general state of the industry being a mess, Yang pledges, "we're doing our best to make sure that we can make the product and have it still available at as good and competitive a price as we can. Yeah, it's challenging for sure."
Back in March, Valve pleaded for a contact that could get it RAM because the memory that does exist is reserved for data centers propping up generative AI, and the RAM that doesn't yet exist is also probably reserved for the data centers that'll prop up AI.
