Valve's Steam Machine starts at $1,049, nearly double a PS5
Valve’s smallest Steam Machine costs $1,049, and the 2TB controller bundle climbs to $1,428. Pre-orders open June 25 under a randomized queue.
Valve has put a $1,049 starting price on the new Steam Machine, a figure that lands at nearly twice the cost of a PlayStation 5 and makes the machine look expensive until the label changes from console to compact PC. The company is offering four configurations: 512GB for $1,049, 512GB with Steam Controller for $1,128, 2TB for $1,349, and 2TB with Steam Controller for $1,428. First shipments are scheduled to begin June 29, with pre-orders opening June 25 through a randomized reservation queue meant to blunt scalpers and bots.
That price buys more than storage. Valve is selling a small black-box PC built around a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA 3 graphics, with 16GB of DDR5 memory and 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM. The company says it delivers more than six times the horsepower of Steam Deck and is meant to run the full Steam library on a TV, backed by Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth, DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0, Ethernet, USB-C, and four USB-A ports. In the 2TB version, buyers also get two extra faceplates, one red fabric and one solid walnut.
The premium is tied to how Valve says it built the machine. Valve began sourcing components in 2023, but rising RAM and storage costs pushed its original target out of reach, and some parts were unavailable at all during stretches of the process, limiting launch supply. Valve says the final price reflects the components it secured over the last six months, and that the machine is being sold at roughly cost rather than as a subsidized console. Yazan Aldehayyat said Valve believed a PC with similar performance could still be a "competitive price," while Valve has described the hardware as part of an "open PC ecosystem" instead of a closed console model.
The backstory explains why Valve is pushing so hard on the living-room PC pitch. The company tried the Steam Machine idea more than a decade ago and largely missed commercially, but Steam Deck, Proton compatibility work, and stronger interest in SteamOS pulled the concept back into view. This time, Valve is not asking buyers to treat it like a cheap console replacement. It is asking them to pay for size, integration, and the Valve software stack in exchange for a fully assembled machine that aims to make a couch PC finally feel finished.
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