The Steam Machine was originally supposed to cost around $750

Valve finally dropped the Steam Machine price today, and it's a tough pill to swallow. The base 512GB model starts at $1,049, with the 2TB version hitting $1,349 and a 2TB bundle with the Steam Controller reaching $1,428. Preorders open June 25 via a lottery system, with the device officially launching June 30.

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Despite the price being deemed ridiculous by many, Valve never wanted it to cost this much. Engineer Yazan Aldehayyat told Eurogamer the final price is "significantly more" than the company had originally planned. So what was the plan? IGN's Jacqueline Thomas sat down with Valve engineers Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat and asked exactly that.

Neither gave a hard number, but they said the price hike the Steam Machine experienced was "probably similar" to what the Steam Deck went through. The math is pretty clear from there. The Steam Deck 512GB recently jumped about 40% from $549 to $789, while the 1TB model went from $649 to $949.

Apply that same 40% increase to the Steam Machine, and you land somewhere around $750 as Valve's original target. IGN's own napkin math pegs a hypothetical $749 pre-RAMflation Steam Machine at about 33% cheaper than today's $1,049 price. That price tag seems a lot more reasonable than the current one, and it would have made the "Gabe-cube" a lot more competitive too.

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The culprit is the ongoing global DRAM shortage. AI hyperscalers have driven DRAM contract prices up more than 170% year over year between Valve's November 2025 announcement and mid-2026. Therefore, Samsung and SK Hynix have shifted fabrication capacity toward high-margin AI server memory rather than the consumer-grade DDR5 and LPDDR5X that go into devices like the Steam Machine.

Valve acknowledged this directly in a blog post:

"Our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. The prices we're sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we've secured them over the past 6 months."

The final value proposition is rough. Early performance benchmarks show that the Steam Machine struggles to match the base PS5 in many games, while equaling it in others. A PS5 currently costs roughly half as much as the Steam Machine, even after recent PlayStation price hikes. Valve has also confirmed it will not subsidize the hardware the way Sony and Microsoft do with consoles, which has always been the fundamental tension here.

Despite the sticker shock, interest in the Steam Machine remains surprisingly strong. Valve's ambition to bring more people into PC gaming via SteamOS is real, but at $1,049 and up, it's going to take a serious correction in the RAM market before the Steam Machine becomes a mainstream proposition. Nevertheless, one can't help but wonder what the gaming landscape would have been like with a $750 Steam Machine.