Nearly nine months on from the reveal of the Steam Machine, Valve has finally revealed when the hybrid PC-console will launch and, more importantly, what it’ll cost. Now, before we get your blood boiling, keep in mind that South Africa won’t get a shot at placing an order anyway, seeing as Valve’s hardware isn’t supported here.
Rage against the Steam Machine
The absolute cheapest you’ll pay for the Steam Machine is $1,050, translating to R17,300 on home soil. That’s bad enough on its own, but it does get worse. Valve’s base model ships with only 512GB of storage — without a controller. You’ll have to shell out R18,600 ($1,128) just to play with Valve’s custom hardware. Rough.
Buyers can, of course, get a bit more storage, assuming they’re ready to pony up in the middle of the RAMpocalypse. Valve will raid your wallet for $1,350 (∼R22,250) to bump that storage up to 2TB, while bundling it with the Steam Controller adds another $78 to the total. Valve did its best to address the concerns:
“The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023,” Valve wrote.
“Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we’re sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we’ve secured them over the past 6 months.”
Paying up isn’t enough to secure a Steam Machine right away
To make matters more complicated, buyers won’t all get their Steam Machines when they officially launch on 29 June. Instead, they’ll be placed into a randomly determined queue, assuming they put an order down for a bundle before 25 June. This has supposedly been implemented to avoid resellers hogging the console’s limited inventory.
It’d be disingenuous to say there isn’t a market for the Steam Machine, even at this exorbitant price point. There are Valve fanboys out there willing to pay, well, anything to help Gaben add another yacht to his arsenal. Hell, we’d love to get our hands on the Steam Machine, just to see what it’s all about. That hasn’t happened. (It hasn’t happened, yet – Ed)
Perhaps it’s for the best. Other international outlets have spent some time with the Steam Machine, which houses a “semi-custom AMD Zen 4” CPU and a “semi-custom AMD RDNA3” GPU, bolstered by 16GB DDR5 physical memory and 8GB GDDR6 VRAM. It didn’t sound great back in November, and now we have proof.
Many of the reviews floating around all point to the same issues — shoddy performance when dealing with some of the bigger triple-A titles, all at a price that hardly anyone can recommend. But hey, at least the Steam Controller looks like a whole lot of fun, right? Right?
