Valve hasn’t officially announced the price of its upcoming Steam Machine consoles. Maybe even CEO Gabe Newell doesn’t know how much the company will eventually decide to charge. But that hasn’t stopped a drip-feed of quote and speculation from pointing toward the higher end of the pricing spectrum. The company recently confirmed it won’t be subsidizing the devices, seemingly squashing any chance of it being less than the price of a PlayStation 5 Pro.
That was the sense we got from comments Valve made back when the Steam Machines were first revealed. Despite an emphasis on “affordability,” the company was also quick to confirm that the consoles would be “very competitive with a PC you could build yourself from parts” but also closer to the “entry level of the PC space” than what some fans might be expecting.
Last week on his LinusTechTips YouTube channel, Linus Gabriel Sebastian confirmed that he asked Valve directly if the smaller storage Steam Machine would be in line with a current $500 console. “Nobody said anything, but the energy of the room wasn’t great,” he said.
The scales have now tipped even further away from that price point in an interview Valve did with gaming channel Skill Up. YouTuber Ralph Panebianco asked point-blank if the company would use proceeds from Steam to make the hardware cheaper than it costs to manufacture. “No,” software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais said. “It’s more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market. Obviously, our goal is for it to be a good deal at that level of performance.”
It’s not been uncommon in the past for console makers to underprice hardware in order to grow their install base and make more money off of selling more games and servers on the backend. As the biggest PC gaming store around, Valve has billions of profits it could through at gaining market share in a potential console war. It sounds like that’s not what the company has planned, however.
No subsidies is basically the final nail in the coffin for any hope that the Steam Machine will be priced to compete directly with a Switch 2, PS5, or pre-tariff Xbox Series X. Some fans are still hoping the 512GB model might come in between $600 and $700, which would put it around the current price of the 1TB Steam Deck OLED.
Even that seems overly optimistic, especially with recent reports that the AI arms race is about to push PC component prices even higher. Next-gen consoles, which all rely on the same chip makers, will be facing similar pressures. We’ll see how it all shakes out when Valve reveals the Steam Machine price early next year. Who knows. Maybe the PS6 and next Xbox won’t be anywhere close to $500, either.
