When Valve first announced its impressive-looking Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller hardware in November, the company said the products would begin shipping in early 2026. Some journalists were specifically told “Q1 2026”. But due to ongoing memory and storage shortages, the launch has been delayed some time to the first half of this year, and Valve says it will reset expectations about cost “as soon as possible.”
“We plan to be able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now,” Valve said in a new post. “But you may have heard about memory and storage shortages across the industry that have grown exponentially since then. The limited availability and rising prices of these critical components means we must re-think our exact shipping schedules and pricing (particularly around Steam Machines and Steam Frames).”
Valve says that “its goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed. But we have to work on solid pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, keeping in mind how quickly the circumstances surrounding both of those things can change.”
When? The Verge and other outlets met with Valve to preview the new hardware, the company remained mostly vague about pricing at the time — one of the most important questions being whether these devices would compete with game consoles rather than PCs. From the beginning, Valve told us that the Steam Machine, its ambitious new console, would be “positioned closer to the entry level of the PC space.” For the Frame, the company said it was aiming for a price that was lower than its previous headset, the Index, which cost $999. And for the Steam Controller, Valve said it was targeting a price that would be competitive with other controllers with “advanced inputs.”
But within just days of Valve’s hardware announcements last November, it became clear that Valve would have difficulty offering competitive pricing as the cost of RAM shoots increased. told this Tom’s Hardware Pricing for the console was difficult to determine because “the market is weird” and “memory prices are rising right as we speak.” As early as 2026, PC gamers may see the price of RAM triple, even quadruple, as memory manufacturers pour their supply into the more profitable AI server sector.
Yesterday, AMD CEO Lisa Su said on an earnings call that “from a product perspective, Valve is on track to begin shipping its AMD-powered Steam Machine early this year.” It seems the words “from a product perspective” were carrying more weight than we thought.
<a href