The Steam Machine, Valve’s new PC gaming answer to the traditional living room console, might not end up shipping in 2026 at all. After already having its pre-order announcement delayed once this year, Valve is now backtracking even further on its commitment to ship the devices in 2026. The increasingly fluid timeline is due to an unprecedented memory crisis as an AI hyperscaling race leads to RAM component shortages.
“Here’s the lineup of hardware we announced in 2025,” Valve, referencing the Steam Machine, new Steam Frame headset, and Steam controller, wrote in a new blog post on Friday. “We hope to ship in 2026, but as we shared recently, memory and storage shortages have created challenges for us. We’ll share updates publicly when we finalize our plans!”
Announced last fall, Valve was originally supposed to reveal pricing and pre-order timelines for the Steam Machine in early 2026. But that plan feel through almost immediately. “Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed,” the company wrote earlier this year. “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.”
Now that “first half of the year” goal has become “we hope to ship in 2026.” The good news is that Valve isn’t ruling out a 2026 release yet. The bad news is that the factors leading to these delays—spiking RAM and storage costs as inventory gets eaten up by AI data centers—don’t seem like they’re going away anytime soon.
Nvidia said in its recent earnings call that it essentially doesn’t expect things to get better anytime soon. Maybe Valve is still trying to lock down certain component contracts before committing to a price, or maybe it just hopes the situation will magically improve over the next few months.
The original speculation around the Steam Machine announcement, given its specs are apparently targeting the current median PC gaming build among Steam users, was that it might cost more than a PS5 Pro. All Valve has said is that it will be priced like a PC rather than like a $500 home console such as the PS5 and that it won’t be using Steam revenue to massively subsidize the price tag. That all points to an eventual piece of hardware that’s pricier than anyone, including Valve, wanted it to be.
