$1050 for 512gb no controller
First - THANK YOU for the heads up! I was hoping when I got the dBrand Companion Cube notification just after midnight.
https://dbrand.com/shop/limited-edition/companion-cube
Second - Anyone notice the controller bundles save you $20 over buying the controller individually? Not so sad my controller reservation is AWOL.
Oooooo that enclosure is sick
When they priced the controller at $99 I immediately suspected it would be part of a bundle deal for “a $99 value!”
Also WOW that cube is so much more than just a dbrand skin. That’s amazing.
“I am sure this overpriced plastic trinket will fill the meaningless void in your finite life” 🤣
Shit I think I may need to go play through the Portal games again.
(HL3 tease at the end)
ALSO WHAT
Pretty sure it’s a troll, no way Valve would let a 3rd party announce that.
fuck that
Yeah no thanks.
as a not that big a gamer, i was thinking of the Steamdeck to replace my aging Minisforum “desktop”.
I had originally thought of the Framework
with 64GB/2TB
and then move move the Minisforum to some LAN self hosting work (Jellyfin etc) but it has nothing for HDDs aside from external USB3, (and 1x internal NVME and 2x internal SSD) which i am led to believe is problematic
i currently just run a HDD on the router and use Kodi via a Nvidia box to a dumb TV.
I’d love to hear opinions from those with more insight
I run Linux mint on the Minisforum
Steam Machine 512GB: $1,049 USD / 1,509 CAD / 1,039 EUR / 879 GBP / 1,609 AUD / 4,389 PLN
Bundle: Steam Machine 512GB + Steam Controller: $1,128 USD / 1,628 CAD / 1,108 EUR / 938 GBP / 1,728 AUD / 4,698 PLN
Steam Machine 2TB: $1,349 USD / 1,919 CAD / 1,359 EUR / 1,149 GBP / 2,109 AUD / 5,739 PLN
Bundle: Steam Machine 2TB + Steam Controller: $1,428 USD / 2,038 CAD / 1,428 EUR / 1,208 GBP / 2,228 AUD / 6,048 PLN
Both the Steam Machine 2TB and 2TB bundle options come with two additional faceplates: red fabric, and solid walnut.
To me, at this point it makes no sense to go with 512gb model, if you pay already that much money. The limitations of 512 is too extreme in my opinion.
And at the price that the 2TB model is, you’d be an idiot to buy it.
You can always replace the storage yourself. A 2TB NVMe doesnt even cost $300 (most are around $250), and if you swapped it yourself, you’d have a 512 GB one to stick into an enclosure and use as a portable hard drive.
And you don’t even have to do that immediately. 512 GB is plenty to start. Especially since not everyone plays enormous AAA games with hundreds of mods. You can upgrade at any time.
It’s worth remembering that most discussions like this are dominated by enthusiasts (including both of us) whereas most people in general are not enthusiasts.
In my experience, most people don’t actively play more than 512GB worth of games at once, and you can add to this with spare microSD cards or other PCs on the network. Steam makes transferring game installs to the main SSD from elsewhere rather painless.
Even as a bit of a data hoarder myself, I only really go beyond 512GB to: 1) keep pace with multiple friend groups that like entirely different game genres I need to all keep available at a moment’s notice, and 2) maintain games modded outside the Steam workshop that I may not play that often but still want to not have to set up more than necessary.
And if you get the controller bundle, you save $20 over buying it separately.
You also save 9 months of waiting on the pre-order list but neither is a good selling point.
My guess is part of the reason for the controller shortages is they reserved a bunch to do these bundles.
💯
I’m surprised people think $1,100 is expensive for a gaming PC, even outside the crazy memory market now.
Same with the $500 Commodore phone.
These are not the 2000s. The dollar has inflated. Technology is expensive. I think cheap junk has desensitized folks to that, but you pay an externalized cost for that stuff.
And of course salaries haven’t gone up so anyone can actually afford it, but… that’s a distinctly separate problem. They should have, as corporate revenue and profit per worker has certainly gone up.
I’m surprised people think $1,100 is expensive for a gaming PC, even outside the crazy memory market now.
$1100 isn’t expensive for a gaming PC. It is, however, expensive for this gaming PC because it’s so incredibly underpowered and non upgradeable that it may as well not even be called a gaming PC. This thing struggles hard to hit playable framerates in current gen games. Even at 720p they’re struggling to hit 30fps. For “next gen” games it’s basically going to just be left in the dark, won’t even be able to play them. The memory bandwidth is terrible, the 8GB VRAM is terrible, the CPU is terrible, and the GPU is literally scraping the bottom of the barrel.
At this exorbitant price it’s DOA. It’ll no doubt sell out because of the steam fangirls buying anything valve throws at them, but they’ll be producing so few of this thing that selling out will mean nothing. They should have cancelled this as soon as they couldn’t launch it for $500.
“30fps at 720p”
In games such as?
Valve directly stated that they had to reconsider their pricing for the steam machine (i.e. increase it substantially more than originally intended) because of the obscenely inflated costs of components. This isn’t just about the steam machine being “too expensive,” the prices for it are quite literally far higher than they should be, albeit with it being for the most part out of Valve’s hands. It’s far more complicated than consumers being greedy and desensitized.
Source for Valve’s statement: https://www.pcmag.com/news/valve-confirms-steam-machine-will-cost-over-1000-heres-how-to-buy-one
Valve notes that the RAM crunch has impacted pricing. “The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of [the] Steam Machine is no longer viable,” it says. “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 six months.”
I wonder why they never named it the radiator?
Yea … I was thinking that is seemed fairly average. I had to replace my kids PC when it went bad. A low-mid tier gaming PC at Bestbuy was $1300, $1600 after I grabbed more memory to put in it.
reasonable given the current situation but not reasonable in general. I’ll wait for prices to go down or my income to go up.
I didn’t get a PS5 when it came out for the same reason. Now it’s more expensive than it was at launch and my wages haven’t changed.
Yeah, we saved for a week, maybe two I don’t remember. I finally saved enough money and my wife bought it as a birthday present for me last year how long was that since release? A couple weeks right. Doesn’t really matter, my friendly local public library has enough cool shit in it to do that I wasn’t wanting for fun. Unless there’s something specific that’s ps5 exclusive you want to play, just get a ps4 and a library card. It kind of feels like blockbuster.
They lost me at that price point, sadly. And I was really looking forward to this thing launching.
Valve makes damn good products, I’m rocking a Steam Deck and a SC in my personal collection, and love them both.
But my next PC upgrade was looking to be just that… a power upgrade. That was the main focus.
The small form factor, the excellent presentation, and the Valve quality that we all know this is going to have… they would have been nice. But right now I’m looking for equal or better than SM performance regardless of form factor, and I have my sights set on several possible options to get that, all of which are at least a couple of hundred dollars cheaper. Sorry Gabe.
8gb of vram in 2026 is not what a “good product” would have. It also costs more than a similar diy pc, performs worse and can’t be upgraded. This thing is doa.
It can absolutely be upgraded, DIY is always going to be cheaper, and at current prices more ram would cause an outsized price increase compared to the performance gains.
8GB vram is perfectly acceptable for the performance level of this box.
It can absolutely be upgraded
Not in any way that matters. It has a non-upgradeable SoC. You can’t just take out the CPU or GPU and replace them.
8GB vram is perfectly acceptable for the performance level of this box.
I think the argument being made is that the performance level of this box is not really acceptable for a game-console-replacement product in 2026.
The performance is pretty bad when compared to the PS5 Pro, which is much cheaper. And comes with a controller.
You can’t bring your Steam library to a PS5, which might be a significant factor, but also if you’ve heavily invested in a library of Steam games, you probably already have a gaming PC, this probably isn’t in any way an upgrade from it, which makes it a pure convenience product for $1k+.
At $900, the PS5 Pro isn’t THAT much cheaper…
So… it’s only $528 cheaper…???
PS5 Pro is 2TB and comes with controller. It is also way faster hardware than Steam Machine and can play native 4K. For $528 less.
It’s 2TB with memory Sony stockpiled before things went crazy. Valve had to buy after things went crazy. 😉
Watch the PS5 price go up again.
The performance is pretty bad when compared to the PS5 Pro, which is much cheaper.
The performance is terrible compared to the PS5 Pro. The performance is pretty bad when compared to the base PS5, which is half the price.
Yeah I was thinking of just grabbing a steam machine for my next box instead of a framework or something. If this pricing isn’t stable for the next, idk, decade? Probably not.
Wow, my prediction was pretty close. 7 months ago, I predicted that the Steam Machine prices would be $800-$900 for the 512GB model, and $1,000-$1,200 for the 2TB model.
That was in the middle of memory prices going vertical, and I still got down voted to hell by people claiming that they were expecting $600-$800 tops…
Honestly, with how bad memory has become even over the last 6 months, and the increased brutality to the market done by tariffs and the oil supply shock, I’m actually surprised they were able to hit $1,049 for the base model.
The hard truth: It’s an acceptable price within a piss-poor market. The harder truth: It will sell out extremely fast and won’t restock likely for months.
When Framework announced their new Framework 13 Pro line laptops last month, a lot of people balked at the price. $1,500 was the cheapest pre-built model, and DIY was basically the same price, unless you already had some components. The pricing for higher tier specs easily climbed to $2,000+
Still, they sold out of every model for the first 6-8 batches in a few days, and barely 2 months later, they are sold out to batch 15, with an expected delivery in October.
The K-shaped market is further becoming a reality. The people that have the money to drop on stuff like this, are happily dropping it. And the people who can’t afford it are getting left in the dust.
The scumbag oligarchs have created the cyberpunk dystopia, and most of us aren’t going to be living up in the shiny skyscrapers…
Nice accuracy and precision on those estimates dude. It’s hard to get that shit right
That was in the middle of memory prices going vertical, and I still got down voted to hell by people claiming that they were expecting $600-$800 tops…
I was getting really tired of the people that kept insisting that Valve would take a loss on the Steam Machine despite their repeated statements that they weren’t going to do so.
At least now they’ll shut up about it, though a lot of them are probably the ones getting mad about the actual release price. But that’s their fault for convincing themselves.
I tried telling people it will be over $1000 on all the forums and discussion sites I’m on, and no-one would believe me lol.
For that kind of money, I may end up building my own running on Bazzite. That’s not to say I don’t like it, it looks bad-ass, but 1K+ for that hardware is a bit much. I’m thinking I can build something a bit more powerful for 100 or 200 dollars less.
Or just run SteamOS directly, why bother with bazzite
Sure, that would work too, I guess.
Is it actually available in a form you can throw on any old PC yet?
Starting with 3.8+ you will be. Their latest blog post discusses it
Nice, I found the doc, thanks!
DOA
Even at double the cost of a normal console, once you factor in the cost of games it comes out ahead. And hopefully the RAMpocalypse will end eventually.
I don’t think that’s true anymore. Going all digital, even on Nintendo’s eShop, most third party games are dirty cheap during sales which happen quite frequently. Most games I’ve looked at go on sale every other month. Of course, they are still stingy as fuck with their first party stuff.
Don’t worry, if it doesnt, some other much worse *-pocalypse will make it all moot!
Yeah, but that ROI window is fairly long
Only if you’ve never bought a game on Steam before
Wanted to switch from console but can’t pre order because I haven’t ordered anything from steam prior to April 27th. At this point I’m just going to stop gaming.
if you are a bit more flexible in the formfactor, you can build a small pc for the budget.
The biggest downside would be the missing HDMI CEC
That’s unfortunately in place to stop scalpers. Realistically, once demand dies down, you’ll be able to order anonymously/with a new account like most pre-existing steam Hardware.
It really does make sense. I wish there could be a line for console ascenders but obviously that’s not plausible without scalpers hopping in.
Shit. Maybe try to find a free game to add to your library? That might do it, might not. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Expensive, but cheaper than I expected. Even at its original price point it probably would have been more than I was willing to pay.
I really wanted one, but at this price point I can build a considerably more capable mATX PC. If I had a living room screen I might consider it, but as a pure gaming PC it doesn’t work for me.
The problem is that it can still be used as a PC. In this case they cannot sell it at a loss and expect to make up for it with their 30% cut on steam games, because other people might buy it as their cheap office PC without ever using steam.
