Over the last week or so there’s been a load of shenanigans about what the Steam Machine might cost. Linus over at Linus Tech Tips and the Skill Up podcast both said the same thing after speaking to Valve. The Steam Machine will not be subsidised. That basically means people shouldn’t expect some ridiculously cheap price tag.
Why Valve Can’t Play The Console Game
Back in the console world the question always came up because Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo could keep their hardware prices low. Sometimes they even sold the boxes at break even or a bit below. They could get away with that because they made the money back when you bought games, subscriptions and accessories through their stores.
That doesn’t work for the Steam Machine. Valve can’t guarantee that people will actually use Steam on it. Someone could buy fifty of them for an office, stick Windows on every unit and never touch the Steam store. At that point Valve has just sold a batch of PCs at a loss with no way to claw the money back.
The Price Is Going To Be Straightforward
That’s the tricky position Valve is in. My own take is the Steam Machine will land close to cost or a bit above. For me that still puts it somewhere around £500 -£600 for the base model. It’s never going to be console cheap because Valve doesn’t control the software pipeline in the same way.
All of this is happening while Xbox is raising prices on its own consoles because Microsoft also isn’t subsidising hardware anymore. They’re shifting their whole focus more toward PC and a platform agnostic future. So the old model of selling hardware low and earning it back later is disappearing across the board.
On top of that RAM and general components are getting more expensive thanks to the AI boom. That makes everything even harder to predict. Which is why trying to guess the Steam Machine’s price is basically a mug’s game. Valve has already said the price will be about the same as a comparable PC you could build for the money, and that’s probably the safest expectation to have.
