Valve’s Steam Machine has been delayed, and the RAM crisis will impact pricing

When Valve first announced its impressive-looking Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller hardware in November, the company said the products would begin shipping in early 2026. Some journalists were told “Q1 2026” specifically. But because of the ongoing memory and storage crunch, that launch has been delayed to sometime in the first half of this year, and Valve says it will reset expectations for how much they will cost “as soon as possible.”

“We planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now,” Valve says in a new post. “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).”

Valve says that its goal of “shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed. But we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change.”

When The Verge and other outlets met with Valve to preview the new hardware, the company remained mostly vague about pricing at the time — one of the most important questions if these devices would compete with game consoles rather than PCs. From the beginning, Valve told us the Steam Machine, its ambitious new console, would be “positioned closer to the entry level of the PC space.” For the Frame, the company said it was aiming for a price that was less than its previous headset, the Index, which cost $999. And for the Steam Controller, Valve said it was targeting a price that would be competitive with other controllers with “advanced inputs.”

But within days of Valve’s hardware announcements last November, it became clear that Valve would have a tough time offering competitive pricing with the cost of RAM shooting up. It told Tom’s Hardware that the console was tough to price because “the market is kind of weird” and “memory prices are going up like right as we speak.” As of early 2026, PC gamers have seen the price of RAM triple, even quadruple, as memory makers pour their supply into the more profitable AI server realm.

Yesterday, AMD CEO Lisa Su said on an earnings call that “From a product standpoint, Valve is on track to begin shipping its AMD-powered Steam Machine early this year.” It seems that the words “from a product standpoint” were carrying a lot more weight than we thought.