As part of the ongoing story, today we’ve got the answers. The Steam Machine will be available for purchase starting on June 25th, three days from now. In the US, the base model without a controller will cost $1,049. We’ve been waiting for the better part of a year to see when the revamped Steam Machine would land, and perhaps, more importantly, how much Valve would charge for it.
As part of the ongoing story, here are the five options offered up for early reserve on the Steam Store:. That version of the devices gets a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 processor with six cores, an RDNA3 8GB graphics card, 16GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 512GB SSD.
In a fresh development, swapping out 512GB to 2TB costs $300 — a lot, but not unreasonable considering the current market that’s already delayed the arrival of all of Valve’s 2026 devices. Adding in a Steam Controller, which is in very short supply, costs $78, a nice discount off the $100 separate purchase. Obviously prices will differ in other territories. So yeah, pretty straightforward.
In a fresh development, or at least, it’s bad from the perspective of someone who’s been watching this space like a hawk since last November. But as you probably know, the PC devices market has gone insane in the interim, and for the first time in decades it’s a lot cheaper to buy a pre-assembled PC than it is to build your own. Roughly parting out the Steam Deck’s devices with current equivalents — using an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X processor, Radeon RX 7600 GPU, and 512GB SSD — costs $1072.72 on PCPartPicker today. And that’s a best-case scenario. The starting price is… bad.
In a fresh development, but viewed as a stand-alone tech industry PC, it’s not unreasonable. Especially if you consider that it’s tiny and stylish and comes with a lot more programs and product support than you’d get from a home build, or arguably even a white-box PC. So yes, the Steam Machine is expensive compared to a system update console, the market it’s meant to compete with directly.
According to the latest update, the cheapest Xbox Series X is $600, ditto for the cheapest PS5, and their more deluxe editions creep towards that $1,000 mark. And presumably, Valve isn’t selling the more powerful and versatile Steam Machine as a loss leader. It’s worth pointing out that the PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch have all been forced to raise their prices in the middle of a generation, another unprecedented bit of fallout from the RAM crisis.
The report highlights that it looks like supply will be extremely limited at arrival, too: Valve is already relying on a sign-up and lottery system for those who want to order the initial batches. I wouldn’t count on being able to get a Steam Machine this year without some luck. I was hoping for something closer to $700-800 when the Steam Machine was unveiled, but as Valve was forced to push the arrival back, it became clear that that would be an impossible target.
According to the latest update, its Snapdragon-based devices is similar to the Galaxy XR, which costs about $1,800. At the very least, the below-market price of the Steam Machine indicates that the Frame might cost a little less than that. The last pillar of Valve’s 2026 devices push, the Steam Frame VR headset, has yet to receive an official arrival date.
The report highlights that on PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a fresh one for a review and building a fresh mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile Worldwide scene Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip. Michael is a 15-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE.