Right now, community speculation is pegging the Steam Machine at around $700. This price can very well go up by the time it's ready for launch since the industry is expected to be navigating a significant component crisis in 2026. Even if everything was fine and dandy, we would possibly be looking at a ~$550-600 price tag at best. For context, you can get a PS5 Pro on Black Friday for just $650.
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Hassam Nasir Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
hotaru251 its likely going to be around 700-800$ as the GPU alone will be 300-400$ (especially as tiem goes on and price of memory makes gpu cost more), then you got the cpu's, ram (which is ofc skyrocketing), the custom case/machining, & their desired profit per machine (the valve brand tax) and as cant replace the gpu (i forgot if can repalce arm cpus?) its MASSIVELY handicapped by the 8GB vram going forward. Reply
runelynx Valve won't subsidize it so they can fully recoup costs and still eat 30% of game developer revenue on the platform. Criminal. Greed at its finest. Reply
SirStephenH runelynx said: Valve won't subsidize it so they can fully recoup costs and still eat 30% of game developer revenue on the platform. Criminal. Greed at its finest. I just read how Valve is one of the most efficient companies in the world, making about $50 million per employee per year. That's insane. Would it really hurt them to hire more employees, decrease their cut of software sales, and/or eat some of the cost of the Steam Machine? Reply
thestryker Word is that the CPU is Hawk Point so that means APU with half the cache of a regular CCD. The GPU is a 7600M which makes it ~12.5% less powerful than the desktop 7600. Using AMD's lowest price CPU/GPU and today's insane memory costs and you're looking at around $850 to build something that will be minimum 15% faster than the Steam Machine. You can buy prebuilts for about that price now which will be even faster (memory prices haven't affected these yet), but next year I doubt that will be as likely. I've been betting on $700 minimum price of entry and you can't ever upgrade the CPU/GPU. I think it's likely to be a bad value and since it doesn't have much of a selling point won't be a big seller. Valve doesn't seem to be worried about selling volume of the Steam Machine though. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/the-upcoming-steam-machine-wont-be-subsidized-like-consoles-to-hit-a-more-attractive-price-target-suggesting-high-relative-pricing-valve-engineer-confirms-the-device-competes-with-only-the-pc-market#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.