How much could the Steam Machine cost? Our prediction

We wish we could tell you outright how much the Steam Machine could cost, but sadly, Valve has not provided any figures, so we’ve put on our detective hat to give you our prediction on how many of your pretty pennies you will have to cough up.

Dubbed by many as the ‘GabeCube’, the Steam Machine offers gamers an exciting proposition: a more powerful Steam Deck hooked up to your TV.

One of the primary pillars of the Deck’s success was its affordability, and Valve has indicated it wants to continue this tradition with the Steam Machine, but stormy clouds are gathering on the PC horizon that are causing the cost of certain components to skyrocket.

With no official word then, it’s up to us to read the tea leaves of interviews, and which market segment Valve is positioning the Steam Machine for, to figure out how much the Steam Machine will cost.

How much could the Steam Machine cost? Our prediction

Speaking to Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips, Valve said that the Steam Machine will be “competitively priced with a PC”, but notes that it will be “priced like a PC rather than like a console”.

This is very telling on where to expect the cost of the Steam Machine to land, as entry gaming PCs are typically more expensive than consoles, at least in their base configuration as opposed to specialist SKUs such as the PlayStation 5 Pro.

Something Sebastian also points out is that console manufacturers typically sell consoles at a loss, knowing that they will recoup money from selling games, but the Steam Machine is a PC, that could just be bought in bulk by companies to be deployed as enterprise computers, with no games sold, meaning that Valve does have to price it in a way that they won’t lose money for sustainability.

A trick Valve has up its sleeve compared to typical prebuilt PCs is that it has designed the Steam machine in-house, meaning Valve only has to spend money on exactly what it needs.

They will also be able to negotiate pricing directly with suppliers such as AMD, who produce both the CPU and GPU featured in the Steam machine, and can reduce the costs further by the fact that Valve will be buying components in bulk.

Looking at pre-built PC suppliers such as AWD-IT, a similarly specced PC, such as the Mars, comes in at £569.99 on sale.

The Mars features an AMD Radeon 7600 8GB GPU, which is slightly more powerful than the “semi-custom” AMD RDNA3 GPU found in the Steam Machine, and an AMD Ryzen 5500 6-core CPU, which is a generation older than the Zen 4-based 6-core CPU of Valve’s home console, and as such, is slower.

Performance-wise, the Steam Machine will probably be faster overall, given the improved CPU, but not by a huge margin.

The Steam Machine might be more performant with similar hardware; however, as testing by multiple vendors has shown some games running better under Linux, but one could just put Linux on the AWD-IT PC and call it a day as well.

As such, we speculate that the Steam Machine could cost in the region of £500-600 if Valve intends it to be competitively priced.

Add in the fact that you will be getting a controller as well, then this value proposition goes up.

There is something to consider, however, and that is the ever-increasing cost of DRAM and NAND modules used for system memory and SSDs, respectively.

The big push for AI is the driving factor here, as large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT gobble up memory.

There is also the tariff situation to take into consideration, which will primarily affect prospective buyers in the US, but Valve could spread the burden internationally so as not to lose out on one of the biggest gaming markets. Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders were delayed in the US due to tariffs, so disruption here for consoles is not unprecedented.

At this point, Valve itself probably doesn’t know exactly how much the Steam Machine will cost. Hopefully, deals and contracts have already been signed ahead of time, but given that no price has been announced, this seems unlikely.

When we know more, we will update you as soon as we can.

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