Valve Narrows Steam Machine Release Window To Summer As Pricing Fears Mount

All eyes are on Valve and its upcoming Steam Machine release, with questions looming over when exactly it will release and how much it will cost. Those questions remain unanswered, though Valve did offer a bit more clarity on the former, saying in a blog post that both the Steam Machine and Steam Frame will be "shipping this summer."

While we still do not have a precise release date, for context, the summer season officially began on June 1st and runs through August 31st. In other words, assuming no further delays, Valve will release its highly-anticipated Steam Machine sometime within the next 12 weeks.

Valve provided the update as an aside to the Steam Machine and Steam Machine being added to its Verified program, which was initially designed to inform gamers how well a game will run on handheld devices.

"We’re excited for players to try your titles on the new Steam hardware once they launch this summer," Valve says.

The other big question mark relates to cost and Valve declined to offer clarity on that front. It's possible that pricing has not been finalized even though a release is now imminent, though it's also possible that Valve is hoping to avoid sticker shock for long as possible.

Pricing is really the elephant in the room, especially on the heels of Valve raising the cost of its Steam Deck OLED last week. The base model with with 512GB of storage now runs $789 and the 1TB model costs $949. Those represent price increases of $240 and $300, respectively.

Valve is not being greedy, and instead is responding to market economics in the wake of an AI-driven shortage of memory and storage chips. The company stated as much when it announced the price increase, saying the new MSRPs "reflect the current state of component costs and other global logistic challenges across the industry as a whole."

It's not unusual for console makers to take a hit on hardware costs and make it up on software (games), but these are unique times we are in. The Steam Deck may or may not serve as a baseline for pricing expectation. Related, Valve doubled down on the claim that the Steam Machine is "roughly six times as powerful as a Steam Deck."

"Long story short: If your game already runs well on Deck, it will also run well on Machine with no extra work required from you. And if it doesn't run great on Deck because of CPU or GPU performance, it may still run great on Machine. If you have games like this, you don't have to take any action: We're already testing every title on Machine that fell below our performance requirements on Deck," Valve states in its blog post.

Now that we're a week into summer, our remaining questions about the Steam Frame should be answered soon enough.