Valve Updates Steam Machine Launch Timing And Pricing As Memory Costs Soar

Reports are coming in fast and furious of Valve delaying its Steam Machine launch as well as other upcoming hardware, but is that really the case? It really just depends on how you interpret Valve's latest update shared in a blog post on Steam. In it, the company acknowledged that circumstances have changed since announcing the Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame in November, and it's taking a beat to evaluate when exactly all three will launch and at what price points.

The Steam Machine and Steam Frame are the most affected by recent market conditions that have seen memory and storage become hot commodities. If you're looking for a bit of good news, it's that the Steam Machine is still on track to launch in the first half of 2026, which is in line with AMD's expectation as well. The bad news? Valve may be forced to upwardly adjust what price point it was originally considering.

"When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you've likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame)," Valve says.

Valve goes on to confirm that it has not changed its plans to ship all three upcoming hardware devices in the coming months. The caveat is that without a specific release date, the Steam Machine and the other hardware launches are somewhat stuck in limbo until Valve can figure things out.

"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. We will keep you updated as much as we can as we finalize those plans as soon as possible," Valve adds.

Outside of the ambiguity surrounding launch timing and pricing, Valve offered up some new details about the Steam Machine, one of which is the claim that most Steam games "play great at 4K 60FPS with FSR" enabled, based on Valve's internal testing. Valve says some titles require more upscaling than others, in which case gamers may opt to play at a lower framerate with VRR to maintain a 1080p internal resolution. We'll have to wait and see, but as a potential preview of performance, we built a facsimile of the Steam Machine and tested 27 games to get a general idea of how it will perform—check it out.

"In the meantime, we are working on HDMI VRR, investigating improved upscaling, and optimizing ray tracing performance in the driver, so we are approaching this from multiple angles," Valve says.

Valve also confirmed what we already suspected about hardware upgrades, which is that both the solid state drive (M.2 2280 or M.2 223) and memory (DDR5 SODIMMs) are accessible and able to be upgraded. The Steam Machine is a PC, after all, so that would have been a giant miss had those parts not been upgradeable.

You can keep an eye on Valve's blog for future updates, and also be sure to bookmark us at Hot Hardware as we'll report any notable updates as they're announced.