Valve Says Memory Crisis is “Still Getting Worse” After Launching $1,049 Steam Machine

Valve’s new Steam Machine has finally started shipping to customers after the memory crisis led the company to wait for several months before announcing its pricing. The Steam Machine starts at $1,049, and that’s for the model with just 512GB of storage and without a controller.

In comparison, Sony’s PlayStation 5, the most popular current-gen console on the market, now starts at $599.99 in the US, while the more powerful PlayStation 5 Pro with its 2TB SSD is priced at $899.99. That’s $250 cheaper than Valve’s Steam Machine, which is also less powerful than Sony’s premium console.

Obviously, this makes the Steam Machine a hard sell, even for people interested in playing Steam games on their TVs. However, Valve believes that there’s real demand for a PC gaming experience in the living room, and that’s why the company also developed its SteamOS platform, which provides a controller-friendly experience on the big screen.

“We suspect that the Steam Machine is a really good way to solve a very real problem that people have,” said Yazan Aldehayyat, an engineer who worked on the Steam Machine project in an interview with Bloomberg. “If that’s borne out to be true, from our opinion, it’s a success.”

As of today, Valve isn’t willing to share sales numbers for the Steam Machine, and the privately owned company isn’t obligated to do so. However, the company intends to continue investing in hardware despite the manufacturing challenges caused by memory and storage costs. “Users are getting their machines,” Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais told Bloomberg. “For a lot of the experience, the work starts. We’ll be doing that for years to come.”

While Valve has yet to announce a release date and pricing details for its Steam Frame VR headset, the company previously announced that it would be released this summer, just like the Steam Machine. Regarding the latter, Griffais said, “We’re basically building everything we can get our hands on,” adding that Valve is “limited by memory capacity, for sure.”

Even though the Steam Machine probably ended up being much more expensive than what people expected, Valve hinted that we’ve not seen the end of AI-driven price increases. “Honestly, it’s still getting worse,” Aldehayyat said. “Just in case people are not aware. What people are seeing on retail shelves right now, from our observations, is lagging what we’re seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months.”