It might be small, but Valve’s Steam Machine carries with it the very real possibility of shaking up the console gaming landscape. The cube has the specs, form-factor, and library to stand toe-to-toe with Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. But the chances of the Steam Machine breaking through come down to one thing: What’s it going to cost?
Valve isn’t sharing specifics yet, but we do have a sense of what its thinking about pricing. In an interview with IGN, Valve repeatedly iterated that it wants Steam Machine to be “affordable.” Consoles tend to be cheaper than building a PC, but Steam Machine is a hybrid of the two concepts. Recent tariffs have also meant that current generation hardware has jumped in price, sometimes more than once. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that it’ll be cheaper than an Xbox Series X, which ranges from $599 to $799 depending on the storage and disc drive.
Higher prices have also become more commonplace in recent months. When the Switch 2 was announced at $499.99, critics were quick to express skepticism. Who would pay for a system that is just barely catching up to the processing power of its contemporaries? Months later, it turns out that the answer is “plenty of people.” The Switch 2 and its higher-priced games have dominated 2025 sales, and the console is breaking records compared to its rivals in a shorter time frame. A higher price tag doesn’t mean a product won’t succeed.
Steam Machine will be available in two models, with one offering a 512GB NVMe SSD and the other being a 2TB NVMe SSD. This gives Valve room to vary its pricing and appeal both to average consumers and dedicated enthusiasts. According to gaming analyst Mat Piscatella, it’s hard to predict where Valve might go with Steam Machine pricing. “My assumption is that this is going to be a product designed for the living room, targeted in a similar range of prices to console devices,” Piscatella told Polygon via email, where he likened Steam Machine offerings to that of the PS5 Pro and Xbox Series X.
“If you’re trying to make a PC that has similar features and similar performance, I think the Steam Machine is going to be a really competitive price to that and provide really good value to it,” Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat told IGN. “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.”
Another factor worth considering here is whether Valve intends to actually make a profit on Steam Machine. While the marketing for the new tech skews more mainstream, Valve has historically produced relatively niche products. The Steam Deck has only sold a few million units by most analyst estimates — Valve doesn’t release sales figures for the handheld — and that’s been the company’s biggest hardware success. Arguably, Valve doesn’t need to make money off Steam Machine — the real profits might lie in maintaining and expanding the larger ecosystem. Valve gets a cut from every game sold on the platform, regardless of whether the company developed the title in question. New customers and existing fans alike have an incentive to keep purchasing Steam games if they’re buying Steam hardware.
Even so, Piscatella doesn’t expect Valve will sell the hardware at a loss. “I don’t think it will be treated as a loss-leader, I’m also not thinking they’re going to be in the business of pricing too aggressively,” he tells Polygon.
Steam Machine aims to simplify building a bespoke machine that’s capable of handling most modern games. But any way you slice it, PCs aren’t cheap. Producing a product that’s affordable compared to a PC could, potentially, mean that Valve might charge more than console-makers do. It’s a safe bet that it’s going to cost more than a new Steam Deck — which currently retails between $399.99 and $649.99 — because Steam Machine is more powerful than Valve’s handheld. But surely Valve doesn’t want a price that could alienate general audiences?
If nothing else, it sounds like Valve is expecting Steam Machine to sell better than its previous attempts at hardware. So what will the Steam Machine cost? With a release window aimed at early 2026, Valve will have to spill the beans soon enough.
