How Much Is That Steam Machine In The Window? Let's Talk Potential...

We don't know the price of the Steam Machine—but we can take a pretty good guess.

We know a lot about the Steam Machine. We know its specifications. We know what it looks like inside. We even know what it's like to game on it. But we don't know how much it'll cost or when it will be available, outside of sometime in the new year.

So, I've asked around the PC Gamer team to find out what we think. With plenty of details on what's inside this machine, and Valve's tactics for the Steam Deck, we have most of the information we need to take an educated guess at the price. We don't know anything more than we've already said in our various stories on Valve's Linux box. We're simply piecing together our expectations, Valve's history, the specs, and some amount of vibes-based optimism from the team—a large amount of vibes-based optimism from the team.

I've tallied up an average from our guesses—or those of us brave enough to actually take a guess—and it's around $525. That's notwithstanding the difference between the smaller 512 GB model and the much larger 2 TB model, however, which may well cost in excess of $100 more based on today's Steam Deck OLED pricing.

Jeremy Laird, Contributor: Valve has clearly gone to great lengths to make the Steam Machine cheap. That AMD GPU is not only an old Radeon RX 7600 chip from three years ago. It's got bits turned off. Valve also decided not to give it 16 GB, which technically would have been easily done, another clear value play. So, Valve is getting access to a load of very cheap, binned-off GPUs for the Steam Machine.

Valve also has form when it comes to aggressive pricing. The Steam Deck is pretty aggressively priced and always has been. In short, Valve isn't about bleeding edge prices and big margins. On the basis of all that, and the reality that the Steam Machine needs to be compelling versus current consoles, I'm expecting at least the entry-level 512 GB version to actually undercut mainstream consoles. In other words, it will be under $499.

The complicating factor here is the ongoing RAM and storage price crisis. That will make hitting whatever price Valve was originally aiming at harder and will also impact higher spec models with more storage. But overall, I still expect the Steam Machine to very much land at the cheaper end of plausible pricing spectrum.

Jess Kinghorn, Hardware Writer: Despite the state of, well, everything, I'm still hopeful for a reasonably priced Steam Machine. The Steam Deck itself kept c

Source: PC Gamer