Valve’s Steam Machine is now late and more expensive. Thanks, AI | usagoldmines.com

I had a feeling this was coming. While Valve has never confirmed the price of its hotly anticipated Steam Machine revival, the specs of the tiny, console-style PC indicated something cheaper than a full gaming desktop—and its exact price will be crucial to its success. But a bit of info hidden in a new FAQ page indicates that even Valve is sweating about the price as much as the rest of us are.

“When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now,” says the FAQ. “But the memory and storage shortages you’ve likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then.” (You can say that again!) Due to the explosion of “AI” data centers gobbling up memory production capacity, RAM in particular is getting insanely expensive. It has doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled in price for the kind of speedy DDR5 DIMMs that PC builders crave. (Shout out to Aftermath’s brilliant title on this topic: “The Steam Machine Has Been Delayed Because Stupid Little Babies Can’t Stop Using AI To Write Their Emails.”)

The price impact isn’t quite so dire for finished electronics due to economies of scale, but a 20 percent bump in the price of PCs is the general estimate making the rounds. Valve recently stopped production of the cheapest Steam Deck handheld, and while we can’t pin that solely on the RAM crisis, it seems almost inevitable that shrinking margins and vanishing supplies of cheap memory were factors in the decision.

Valve continues in the FAQ: “Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed. 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.”

The company says it will work hard to get information to us sooner. But the RAM crunch isn’t expected to get any better this calendar year, possibly extending for multiple years. Either the Steam Machine is going to cost a lot more than the initial (and entirely unofficial) estimates of $800 to $1,000… or Valve will need to bite the bullet and subsidize some of the expense, in the same loss-leader approach that game console hardware is generally sold. With a big push to extend Steam’s power in the PC gaming space and take a bite out of the console market, it might be worth dipping into Valve’s seemingly endless coffers.

The FAQ wasn’t all gloom and doom. We did learn that the Steam Machine is targeting 4K/60FPS graphics, albeit with the help of AMD’s FSR upscaling and frame generation tech. Some especially intense games will need to cut down to 1080p and lower frame rates, which isn’t shocking given an 8GB GPU. The internal SSD and RAM DIMMs will be user-accessible and upgradeable. And the Steam Frame VR headset should be able to fit most glasses inside, with a possible option for prescription lens inserts (something already available for competing headsets like the Meta Quest and Valve’s own Index).