When Valve first announced its impressive-looking Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller hardware in November, the company said the products would begin shipping in early 2026. Some journalists were specifically told “Q1 2026.” But due to the ongoing memory and storage crisis, that launch has been pushed back to sometime in the first half of this year, and Valve says it’s resetting expectations for how much they’ll cost “as soon as possible.”
“We planned to be able to share specific pricing and release dates as early as now,” Valve says in a new post. “But memory and storage shortages, which you’ve probably heard about throughout the industry, have increased rapidly since then. The limited availability and rising prices of these critical components mean we have to re-evaluate our exact delivery schedule and pricing (especially for the Steam Machine and Steam Frame).”
Valve says its goal “to deliver all three products in the first half of the year has not changed. However, we need to work to get to concrete pricing and launch dates that we can announce with confidence, while keeping in mind how quickly circumstances around both of these things can change.”
When The Verge and other outlets met with Valve to preview the new hardware, the company remained mostly vague about pricing at the time — one of the most important questions being whether the devices could compete with game consoles rather than PCs. From the beginning, Valve told us that the Steam Machine, its ambitious new console, would be “positioned closer to the entry level of the PC space.” For the Frame, the company said it’s aiming for a price that’s lower than the previous Index headset, which cost $999. And for the Steam Controller, Valve said it was aiming for a price that would be competitive with other controllers with “advanced inputs.”
But within days of Valve’s hardware announcement last November, it became clear that Valve would have a hard time offering competitive pricing with rising RAM costs. It said it Tom’s hardware that the price of the console was difficult to determine because “the market is a little weird” and “memory prices are going up as we speak”. By early 2026, PC gamers saw the price of RAM triple, even quadruple, as memory manufacturers for their supplies into the more profitable realm of AI servers.
Yesterday, AMD CEO Lisa Su said on the earnings call that “From a product perspective, Valve is on track to start shipping its AMD Steam Machine early this year. It seems that the words ‘product-wise’ carried a lot more weight than we thought.”