To say that Valve’s newest hardware reveal looks promising – and more than a little threatening if you’re Sony or Microsoft – would be an understatement. However, as is always the case, price remains a stickler, and aside from better distribution, there are no details on how much the new Steam Frame or Steam Machine will cost.
That being said, Valve hardware engine Yazan Aldehayyat did promise the latter would be a “really competitive price” compared to building a PC with “similar features and performance.”
“If you’re trying to make a PC that has similar features and similar performance, I think the Steam Machine is going to be a really competitive price to that and provide really good value to it,” he told IGN. “The affordability piece you mentioned is one of the reasons why we think a Steam Machine makes a lot of sense right now.”
“So it’s just something that we thought about every time we made a hardware decision, a feature decision, is to make sure that we keep it as approachable, as affordable as possible.”
If it wants to position itself as a viable PC that also doubles up as a living room gaming device, then appealing to a wide audience is necessary. Of course, given Steam’s prominence and the success of the Steam Deck, Valve could maybe get away with charging a bit more.
The Steam Machine features a semi-custom six-core AMD Zen 4 CPU with 12 threads and up to 4.8 GHz alongside 16 GB DDR5 RAM. Its RDNA3 GPU is also semi-custom, with a 2.45 GHz max sustain clock speed, 8 GB GDDR6 VRAM, and 28 Compute Units. And while pricing remains unknown, the model with the 512 GB NVMe SSD should be significantly cheaper than the one with 2 TB.
The Steam Machine, Steam Frame and new Steam Controller all launch together in early 2026.
