The Steam Machine marks Valve’s long-awaited return to the console wars. It looks slick and sounds powerful enough to play modern games on decent settings. But Valve is leaving the biggest question of all unanswered: how much will it cost? There’s no official price tag yet, though we do have some early clues that point to the Steam Machine being at least $800 or more.
Valve probably wants to wait until closer to launch before committing to a price tag for both the 512GB and 2TB models. It wouldn’t want a repeat of what happened to the Nintendo Switch 2 when President Trump torpedoed the Mario maker’s initial pre-order plans by announcing massive tariffs days before they were set to begin. Valve is promising to reveal more information in early 2026. But that doesn’t mean we’re completely in the dark about how much the Steam Machine will cost.
“Steam Machine’s pricing is comparable to a PC with similar specs,” Valve told The Verge when it asked it if would cost more than PS5 Pro. Designer Pierre-Loup Griffais elaborated a bit more. “We intend for it to be positioned closer to the entry level of the PC space, but to be very competitive with a PC you could build yourself from parts,” he said.
Based on The Verge‘s napkin math, building a PC from off-the-shelf parts to match the Steam Machine’s specs would start at around $800, but it wouldn’t get you anywhere close to the living room device’s small, compact footprint. That would require spending closer to $1,000, before taking into account things like storage. The PS5 Pro starts at $750 and comes with 2TB of storage, but it’s also benefitting from a massive supply chain operation from a company that’s been mass-manufacturing home consoles for decades.
Valve wants the Steam Machine to be ‘as affordable as possible’
Still, it sounds like Valve doesn’t just want the Steam Machine to cater to existing PC gamers who are used to investing $1,500 and beyond in new rigs. Affordability also sounds like a top priority and there’s always the question of how much of the upfront cost of the hardware Valve is willing to eat on its end. A bigger Steam install base ultimately means more people paying Valve a 30-percent commission on every game they buy.
“But we obviously also wanted to make the device affordable,” Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat told IGN “We understand that affordability is really important, so we kept that in mind and made sure that’s a device that’s going to be reachable for a lot of people.”
He continued, “The affordability piece you mentioned is one of the reasons why we think a Steam Machine makes a lot of sense right now. So it’s just something that we thought about every time we made a hardware decision, a feature decision, is to make sure that we keep it as approachable, as affordable as possible.”
Whether Valve can keep the Steam Machine pricing “console-level” will ultimately determine whether it ends up feeling like a pricey PC accessory like the ROG Xbox Ally X or a real competitor in the broader console gaming space. It could also be a bellwether indicating if the next-gen Xbox and PlayStation 6 stay in the realm of $500-$600 or start pushing the barrier to entry even higher.
