Valve has just explained the key reason why it’s already launched the Steam Controller, but there’s still no sign of its Steam Machine, despite the mini gaming PC originally being announced with an “early 2026” release date in November 2025. According to Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali, in an interview with Polygon, the answer is mainly that the Steam Controller “doesn’t have RAM in it.”
This suggests it’s now difficult for Valve to source the Steam Machine’s system memory, and VRAM for that matter, at reasonable prices. There’s not a huge amount of memory inside the Steam Machine. Valve’s specs list shows it having 16GB of DDR5 system memory, while its Radeon RX 7600 GPU has 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM. However, RAM prices were already starting to go up when Valve first announced the Steam Machine, driven by low supply resulting from the AI boom, and they’re now sky-high.
Back in 2025, a 16GB (2x8GB) 5,600MT/s Kingston Fury DDR5 kit cost £49.99 from OcUK, for example, but will now set you back £199.99. That’s a quadrupling in price at retail, and while Valve will have some inroads to suppliers for bulk buying, the lack of supply and increasing prices are clearly making this launch difficult for the company.
Cardinali also added that the Steam Controller isn’t “as complicated to start getting out the door for us” as the Steam Machine, while claiming that there was never necessarily an intention to launch the Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame all at the same time. “From the beginning, these were all different products,” Cardinali told Polygon, adding that “the really only hard deadline is we didn’t want to ship the Steam Machine before the Steam Controller.” To put it simply, he says “there’s no point in holding it [the Steam Controller] back while we work through the other stuff.”
Meanwhile, regular Valve leaker Brad Lynch, has added some more context, following on from the Polygon piece. “I’ve been told some Valve Internal pricing targets they had before AND after RAM skyrocketed,” says Lynch. “Machine is affected the most. Frame is not as bad. Valve hasn’t released a price for the Steam Machine yet, but we had a stab at estimating it, based on a PC with similar components. At that time, our estimated Steam Machine price came out at just over £700, but the same spec now costs over £1,000, thanks to rocketing DRAM and storage costs.
That all creates a difficult situation for Valve. Ideally, the Steam Machine needs a temptingly low price, like the MacBook Neo, to succeed as a consumer device, particularly when the specs are so conservative compared to a modern gaming rig. More competition is good, though, and we’ll be really interested to try out this dedicated SteamOS gaming rig and all-purpose PC when it eventually sees the light of day.
