Video Game History

Valve updates hardware launch timing due to component pricing

Last November, Valve announced three new Steam hardware devices: the next-gen Steam Machine, Steam Frame VR headset, and a new Steam controller.

The platform holder had yet to finalise specific pricing and launch dates, but shared its goal of shipping in "early 2026."

"Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed," it said. "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)."

"There's been a surge of demand for memory chips, driven above all by the high-end High Bandwidth Memory that AI requires," said historian and author Chris Miller. "This has led to higher prices across different types of memory chips."

"With both demand clarity and supply constraints converging, suppliers have steadily pushed prices upwards, in some cases aggressively."

While Valve revisits its pricing for its upcoming Steam hardware, the firm previously said the cost of the Steam Machine in particular will be "pretty competitive."

"I think that if you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that's the general price window that we aim at," said Valve software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais.

"Ideally, we'd be pretty competitive with that and have a pretty good deal, but we're working on refining that as we speak, and right now is just a hard time to have a really good idea of what the price is going to be because there's a lot of different things that are fluctuating."