The Steam Machine starts at $1,049. That’s steep compared to the PS5 or Xbox Series X, and Valve knows it. But the company has no plans to eat the cost to bring the price down. This isn’t about margins — it’s about ideology.
“If there’s anything we’re religious about at Valve, it’s our belief that open systems are better in the long run,” the company told The Verge. The argument goes like this: when console makers sell hardware at a loss, they’re building a walled garden. They recoup the money through subscription services and locked-in game sales. Valve thinks that’s bad for everyone.
“You shouldn’t feel like you have to buy Valve hardware,” the company said. “You should be able to view it as just one option alongside all the devices for playing games.” Subsidizing the hardware, in Valve’s view, would undermine the open PC ecosystem that’s driven decades of innovation.
So the Steam Machine is being sold at or near cost. Valve’s Lawrence Yang put it bluntly: “The cost of the product is basically the cost of the components and what it takes to make it.” And with component prices through the roof, that means consumers pay the real price of building a gaming PC in a console form factor.
The component crisis has also hammered Valve’s launch plans. They’re producing roughly two-thirds of the units they originally intended. At one point, Griffais said, the company wasn’t sure they could build “any significant quantity” at all.
Valve first announced the Steam Machine late last year, right as the memory crunch was beginning. They’d planned to ship it in early 2026 alongside the Steam Controller and Steam Frame VR headset. The controller made it. The headset didn’t. And the Steam Machine arrived months late, hundreds of dollars above where it might have been.
