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

When Valve first announced its impressive Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller hardware in November, the company said products would begin shipping in early 2026. Some journalists were told specifically about “first quarter 2026.” But due to the ongoing memory and storage crisis, that launch has been pushed back to the first half of this year, and Valve says that will reset expectations for how much they’ll cost “as soon as possible.”

“We anticipated being able to share specific pricing and launch dates right now,” Valve said in a new post. “But the memory and storage shortages you’ve probably heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. Limited availability and increasing prices for these critical components mean we need to review our shipping schedule and exact pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame).”

Valve says its goal of “shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed. But we have work to do to arrive at concrete pricing and launch dates that we can announce with confidence, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around these two things can change.”

When The edge and other outlets met with Valve to preview the new hardware, the company remained rather vague on pricing at the time – one of the biggest questions whether these devices would compete with games consoles rather than PCs. From the start, Valve told us that 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 lower price than its previous headset, the Index, which cost $999. And for the Steam Controller, Valve said it was aiming for a price that would be competitive with other controllers with “advanced inputs.”

But days after Valve’s hardware announcements last November, it became clear that Valve would struggle to offer competitive pricing with the skyrocketing cost of RAM. He said Tom’s material that the console’s price was difficult to gauge because “the market is a little weird” and “memory prices are going up as we speak.” Since the start of 2026, PC gamers have seen the price of RAM triple and even quadruple, as memory manufacturers invest in the more profitable area of ​​AI servers.

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