Valve looks as though it’s gearing up to launch its Steam Machine, as a large number of “game console” shipments have been spotted heading to the company in the US. Valve’s new PC gaming machine was originally announced in November last year, but rocketing RAM and storage prices have since put a big question mark over its launch date.
The shipping notices were noticed by regular Valve leaker Brad Lynch, who shared the details in a post on X. However, we’ve also checked them ourselves, and they do indeed show a number of Valve shipments with “game console” listed in the description, as you can see in the screenshot below. Bear in mind that this table shows search results for the term “Valve Corporation,” so it also contains some references to actual valves imported by corporations.
The most recent game console shipment was on 23 April, with two other entries on 18 April. Valve also received a shipment of wireless PC controllers on 4 April, a month before the Steam Controller’s retail launch date. Of course, “game console” is a pretty nebulous term that may not refer to the Steam Machine at all.
We could be looking at a bunch of Steam Decks here, or perhaps Steam Frame headsets. However, further down the thread on X, Brad Lynch replies to another user, saying it’s a “safe assumption” that these are Steam Machine shipments, rather than Steam Frames. He also speculated that there are perhaps some “Steam Deck restocks thrown in the mix.”
Basically, no one can be really sure what’s in these “game console” shipments, but we’re hoping the Steam Machine is going to be arriving soon. The big question is how much it’s going to cost. Given that the Steam Machine GPU is an underpowered, last-gen RDNA 3 chip similar to the AMD Radeon RX 7600, it at least needs to be price-competitive with Sony and Microsoft’s latest consoles.
Memory costs have clearly been a massive factor here, with Valve recently saying that the reason why the Steam Controller launched first was because it “doesn’t have RAM in it.” Either way, Valve is clearly stocking up on something akin to a game console right now, and it would be great to see the Steam Machine finally break cover.
