Valve has warned that an ongoing industry-wide RAM and storage shortage is likely to impact the final pricing of its upcoming Steam Machine hardware, with the company saying rising component costs have forced it to reassess what it can realistically charge at launch.
In a new post on its Steam Hardware Blog, Valve said it originally hoped to have firm prices locked in by now, but that rapidly increasing memory costs across the tech sector have complicated those plans, particularly for Steam Machine and its new Steam Frame device.
The company stressed that while it still aims to ship its new hardware lineup in the first half of the year, pricing remains unsettled due to the volatile supply situation.
RAM shortages force Valve to revisit Steam Machine pricing
Valve said the “limited availability and growing prices” of memory and storage components meant it had to reconsider both its shipping schedule and the devices’ final price to consumers.
“When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now,” the company wrote. “But the memory and storage shortages you’ve likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then.”
Those rising costs, Valve added, have made it difficult to confidently lock in a final retail price for Steam Machine while supply conditions remain unstable.
“Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed,” Valve said. “But we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change.”
Beyond pricing concerns, the blog post also outlined several technical details about the Steam Machine, including performance targets and upgrade options.
Valve said that in its testing, most Steam titles can run at 4K and 60 frames per second with upscaling enabled, though some demanding games may require heavier scaling or lower frame rates paired with variable refresh rate support. The company added that it is continuing work on HDMI VRR, ray tracing optimizations, and improved upscaling through driver updates.
The firm also confirmed that the Steam Machine will allow users to upgrade key components, with both the SSD and DDR5 memory accessible.
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