Valve shook up the gaming world with the announcement of the Steam Machine, but we’re all still curious about the million-dollar question of pricing. Although there has been a lot of speculation, we finally got some sort of hint directly from Valve. In an interview with the Friends of Skill Up on Second podcast, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais revealed that the Steam Machine will not be subsidized but will still have competitive pricing.
“I think if you build a PC from parts and basically reach the same level of performance, that’s the general price window we’re aiming for,” Griffiss said on the podcast. “Obviously, our goal is to have a good deal at that level of performance, and then you have features that are really hard to create if you’re building your own gaming PC from parts.”
Griffis did not offer a concrete price range because Valve was still early in the process, and said that “right now it’s a hard time to really have a good idea what the price is going to be because there are a lot of different things that are going to fluctuate.” When asked if the Steam Machine would be subsidized like other companies often sell new consoles at a loss or low profit margin to generate initial momentum, Griffeys said no and that it would be “in line with what you might expect from the existing PC market.”
However, Griffis also revealed that Valve is potentially interested in doing a Steam Machine Pro, but that the company is currently focusing on this mid-range level as a “good tradeoff between affordability and the level of power we get.”
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