The most exciting hardware for PC gamers this decade is the Steam Deck, a portable handheld gaming PC that’s almost singlehandedly created a product category. Valve’s console-ish follow-up, the revived Steam Machine, was almost as exciting when it was announced last year. But we’re getting towards the end of Q1 2026, and we still don’t know when it’ll arrive or for how much.
Valve offered a nominal update late last week, covering the Steam Machine, the Steam Frame VR headset, and the new second-gen Steam Controller. “We hope to ship in 2026,” read the initial “Steam Year in Review 2025” post, “but as we shared recently, memory and storage shortages have created challenges for us. We’ll share updates publicly when we finalize our plans!”
The post was updated without comment over the weekend, with more firm wording, after it got some attention:
We shared recently that there have been challenges with memory and storage shortages, but we will be shipping all three products this year. More updates will be shared as we finalize our plans.
If you’ve been following along you know that as recently as a month ago, Valve said that “Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed.” So we’ve definitely seen the goalposts move to “2026,” and the primary culprit appears to be the RAM crisis.
As data center buildout gobbles up all the supply of memory and storage, even maxing out the production futures from suppliers like Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix, the price of consumer-grade RAM is skyrocketing. It’s most visible in laptop and desktop RAM sold at retail, the very end of the supply chain, but basically all finished electronics are being affected to a greater or lesser degree. Consumer PCs are expected to jump in price at around 20 percent — you can see it very visibly in Framework’s RAM prices going up as the company’s stockpiles deplete.
Pricing for the Steam Machine will be crucial, and Valve has barely mentioned it so far. Since it’s competing with the PlayStation (and, I suppose technically, the Xbox) on their home living room turf, it needs to be as cheap as possible. But with 1TB of storage, 16GB of RAM, and an 8GB discrete graphics card supplied by AMD, the prices for those components are only going up and up. Valve is big, but it doesn’t have the supply chain muscle to withstand market forces — even its Steam Deck has been in short supply, and it’s still out of stock in the US at the time of writing.
It’s definitely possible that a lack of components, or at least components at prices that are manageable, will push the Steam Machine release into 2027. I’d say it’s even possible it could make the entire endeavor untenable for Valve, despite certainly sinking millions into the hardware’s development and announcement already. However much the company has spent on it, they know that a $1,500-2,000 living room PC just won’t move enough units, no matter how well positioned they are to take a bite out of the console market.
It seems to me that Valve is waiting and hoping that it can force the numbers to make sense, just like the rest of us.