The Steam Machine 2026: a full gaming PC in a six-inch black cube. (Valve Software press image)
Valve Software abruptly opened reservations for its latest Steam Machine on Monday, but due to the ongoing PC component shortage, did so at a significantly higher price than expected.
The company, headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., first announced the new version of the Steam Machine late last year. It’s a small-scale, high-powered gaming PC that’s designed for your living room, which runs the same Linux-based SteamOS as Valve’s Steam Deck.
The 2026 Steam Machine starts at a whopping $1,049 through Valve’s digital storefront Steam, which gets you the base model with an internal 512GB SSD. A higher-end model with a 2TB drive costs $1,349, and both also come in bundles with one of Valve’s new Steam Controllers.
It is, on paper, an impressive overall device, particularly as a sort of gateway product for anyone who’d like to break into gaming on PCs and/or Linux. However, its price tag is a significant barrier. A comparatively powerful PC would still cost as much or more, but Valve’s old strategy with the Steam Deck, by comparison, was to practically give it away.
As it turns out, Valve isn’t particularly happy about the price either, preemptively addressing concerns via a post on the official Steam blog. The short version is that the planned launch of the Machine has been complicated by the ongoing component crisis that surrounds SSDs and RAM.
The prices “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 6 months,” the company said in the post.
The two Steam Machine models’ internal storage capacity is the only difference between them. Both are gaming PCs that pack “semi-custom” AMD CPUs and GPUs, 16 GB RAM, Bluetooth capability, an ethernet port, and a MicroSD card slot into a 6” black cube, complete with a removable faceplate.
The Steam Machine 2026 comes with an LED panel on the front, which can be customized, used to track downloads, or turned off entirely. (Valve Software press image)
The high cost of entry for the Steam Machine is another knock-on effect from the ongoing global RAM and SSD shortages, which were initially created by high demand from the burgeoning AI industry. The same problems have resulted in multiple price hikes for current-generation gaming consoles and spiked the costs for new-built gaming PCs. It’s been a bad time for the hobby overall, especially for newcomers and players on a budget.
The Machine isn’t likely to fail, but its costs may mean that for the time being, it turns into little more than an expensive toy for gadgetheads. One of Valve’s quiet ambitions for years has been to bring more people into PC gaming, and especially PC gaming on Linux, but for a thousand bucks a throw, the Machine isn’t likely to draw in any new customers.
That suggests that if a company like Valve, which controls roughly half the PC gaming on Earth via Steam, is having problems like this, then it’s wise to expect further disruption for the foreseeable future. Xbox in particular was talking about launching a new console at the end of 2027, but with RAM and SSD costs on the rise, it looks like the next generation of hardware will either be prohibitively expensive or best pushed off for a few years.
As with the Deck, you get games onto the Machine via direct download from Valve’s digital storefront Steam. Also as with the Deck, the Machine is designed so it can also be used as a desktop computer, with no particular guardrails to keep out tinkerers and modders.
Even with their high cost, and with a lower number of available units at launch than Valve had planned, the 2026 Steam Machine was already listed as “out of stock” within 10 minutes of the store page opening, which was before Valve itself had officially announced it had done so.
However, Valve has implemented a lottery system in order to stymie resellers and attempt to make the process as fair as possible. Any interested buyers can sign up for a Steam Machine reservation at any time before this coming Thursday, at which point Valve will randomize the queue. Anyone who doesn’t get in on Thursday will be added to a waiting list.
