$1050 for 512gb no controller
I didn’t even realize they launched today until I saw the GamersNexus review
It was a surprise drop, as far as I know. We knew it would be soon due to rumors.
I got the dBrand Companion Cube notification just after midnight.
https://dbrand.com/shop/limited-edition/companion-cube
So I was HOPING today!
I don’t think it’s “launched” yet since they’re doing a raffle system:
Join the list any time before June 25th at 10 a.m. PT. On that date, the list will be closed and randomized, and you will receive an email with your results shortly after.
Launched in the sense that the review embargo is lifted, I suppose.
First - THANK YOU for the heads up! I was hoping when I got the dBrand Companion Cube notification just after midnight.
https://dbrand.com/shop/limited-edition/companion-cube
Second - Anyone notice the controller bundles save you $20 over buying the controller individually? Not so sad my controller reservation is AWOL.
When they priced the controller at $99 I immediately suspected it would be part of a bundle deal for “a $99 value!”
Also WOW that cube is so much more than just a dbrand skin. That’s amazing.
“I am sure this overpriced plastic trinket will fill the meaningless void in your finite life” 🤣
Shit I think I may need to go play through the Portal games again.
(HL3 tease at the end)
ALSO WHAT
Pretty sure it’s a troll, no way Valve would let a 3rd party announce that.
Oooooo that enclosure is sick
I look forward to see this reviewed, 28 Compute Units on the GPU is below the Radeon RX 9060 XT that has 32.
Hopefully it isn’t too limited in other aspects like RAM bandwidth.But on the other hand an RX 9060 XT alone is almost half the price of this entire unit (EU price). So if it can perform about as fast as that, it seems like a pretty good deal.
The steam machine is based on RDNA 3 aka the RX 7000 series, and we knew it was heavily underclocked. Even thinking about the 9060 xt was a lofty expectation.
The problem is that you can build a way faster system yourself for the same money. And that can be easily upgraded later.
These things are supposed to be relatively cheap for the hardware when they come out.
And this only performs like an RX 6600XT at best. Which is a 5 year old lower mid range GPU.It’s not that it doesn’t have its merits, it’s a cool little box, and probably good enough for most games at 1080p.
But IMO it is a bit under-powered for the price.
That’s gonna be a no for me dawg.
I blame the AI bubble memory shortage for making this over $1,000 USD.
Yeah no thanks.
I wonder how much it would’ve cost if we didn’t have a dumb mother fucker in charge and greedy rich bastards weren’t hoarding all the supplies
speculation says 750ish. which really would have been perfect
https://steamdeckhq.com/news/valve-steam-machine-original-price/
Yeah, this was my guess as well in a pre-ram crisis era.
$750 is still about $250 too expensive for what it is and the performance it has.
it’s not just the one dumb motherfucker in charge, it’s practically the entire goddamn government. anyone who isn’t vocally outspoken against AI companies and aiming to put a hard stop to their data centers is fully responsible for any and all harm they’re currently causing (and the hardware inflation is such a minor part of said harm).
anyway abolish capitalism and send techbros to the guillotines
it’s practically the entire goddamn government.
Why don’t you draw the logical conclusion, and realize it’s the American population that elected the dumb motherfucker that is responsible for the entire administration. And an American population that also elected a congress that doesn’t do anything!
For fucks sake, Americans elected an obvious psychopath for president, with an equally psychopathic vice president!!!
Electoral politics means nothing when the entire issue is rooted in the very foundations of the country and capitalism as a whole. One dumbass being elected isn’t an anomaly, he’s an inevitable symptom of the problems that have been there for ages.
So are you one of those that claim that Republicans and Democrats are the same?
That having a Republican controlled congress with a Republican president is the same as if they were both Democrat?because if you answer that with a yes, I think I’m just gonna block you.
Your comment assumes the people have real power. The parties are not the same but they also are in ways. This is the manufactured fight they shove us all into because it’s beneficial for maintaining their power and keeping us distracted. Both roads lead to a genocide continuing and they both allow the same people to maintain wealth. It’s not a blue vs red issue; it’s an us vs them one. It’s class war among the wealthy and the poor working class. You can vote blue if it helps you sleep at night, but just understand that it’s the equivalent of Maggie’s steering wheel in the Simpsons intro. The illusion changes on the surface but continues the same behind the scenes at the root, because they will never allow us to vote away their power.
Spoken like a true lib lmao
The American people are some of the most propagandised on Earth. Our education has been eroded over decades and we are steeped in a media sphere almost entirely owned by the wealthy which constantly discredits anything remotely socialist and tells almost nothing but lies about the outside world. People can’t even usually protest in a serious way without losing their jobs, and therefore their healthcare and housing. When protesters burned down the police station in Minneapolis in 2020, that was ranked with a higher approval rating than nearly any politician elected at the time.
Even if a good candidate is elected, the power comes from the wealthy, they will subvert any thing progressive using their trillions of dollars and surveillance panopticon.
So a lot of Americans did vote for this horrific administration, but most people don’t even know what they are voting for, and voter turnout is egregiously bad because most people don’t feel they can even trust what they are told about politics.
Even if a good candidate is elected, the power comes from the wealthy,
Exactly, taking your country back, should start with taxing the rich heavily, not with giving them even lower taxes. That would be a good start for Americans.
So a lot of Americans did vote for this horrific administration, but most people don’t even know what they are voting for
And the second time around?
Yeah it’s 100% on the people and not the constant onslaught of propaganda; the fake checks and balances that were actually escape hatches for the wealthy; the terrible propped up candidates, like the time the US population very much wanted Bernie, and instead got Hillary; AIPAC and other lobbyists permeating the government; nepotism; the ramping up of police funding; the capture of all media by the right; manipulation via companies like Meta, who have been involved in regime change and genocide before…
This is simple cause and effect which seems to be lost on a lot of people. Trump and his dipshit admin are losing traction daily when it comes to voter support because they can no longer uphold the lies. We’re now at the point where they’re telling us the pond is clear when it’s green.
But the people are 100% to blame for this one. We only had a metric fuckton of literature and predictions dating back over a hundred years telling us this would happen and that capitalism would absolutely collapse and corrupt in this way.
Yeah it’s 100% on the people
Ultimately the responsibility is on the people. Who else would it be?
It’s on the people to break free of their chains and revolt, but they have to stop blaming each other first, and stop misidentifying symptoms as causes.
On that we agree.
Right on. Being able to bridge those gaps is gonna make or break the future for the working class. If we have too many purity test barriers, we won’t ever be able to truly unify. Fred Hampton was a great voice when it came to reminding folks of this. The left can constantly lambast “libs” but the reality is that a lot of folks are getting educated and are willing to talk. Deterring them with gated communities and tests will only hinder our collective progress. At the end of the day, we’re all on the same side.
Careful, lemmings hate it when you point out that voters and non voters are responsible for the government we have, or that it’s largely a reflection of the culture and society we propagate.
Absolutely, Trump is a symptom not the disease, American society is sick. That doesn’t mean all Americans are sick, there are good Americans. But enough Americans see psychopathy as an expression of freedom. So they are willing to vote for a clear psychopath. The disease in American society is like a cancer, it’s not all cells in the body that are cancerous, but it’s enough to make the society very very sick.
“American society” is sick. Which Dreamland country where oligarchs don’t control the decisions are you from again?
The whole world is sick my guy.
abolish capitalism
What does this mean, exactly?
I’m not sure, but let’s live a little, try something new and see where it goes.
I play music and grow some mean artichokes. Like they have thorns and everything they’re delicious. Willing to trade sass for butter
you take capitalism
you place under guillotine
you manœuver guillotine
done
Hunger ensues.
shiiiii I forgot last step !
eat the rich
Communism, comrad!
Reorganize our economic system into one in which the means of production, ie factories, farms, utilities etc, are collectively owned by the people instead of being owned by the rich elite who take all profit for themselves.
So, no mom and pop shops? No lemonade stands? No independent book stores? No family farms? Nobody allowed to sell homemade quilts or paintings?
How did you get that from what he said? Your example would still be the people who make the product owning the profits.
So, you’re in favour of private ownership of the means of production?
You’re confusing personal property with essential infrastructure. You can have and sell all those things even under communism.
Apparently Valve said to look at the Steam Deck price hike for a clue. So probably around $750 for the base model.
999 for 1 tb with controller.
My guess would be like 600 or so for the base model.
LTT got a bit of a guess from Valve, the estimate is that the price was adjusted roughly in line with the recent Steam Deck increase.
Puts it about 850 or so for the base model if I’m estimating properly, but that is going from announcement to now, not all the way back to the beginning of all this mess.
Let’s pick Oct 2025 as our ‘pre RAMpocalypse’ time frame.
Data source: pangoly.com
(I removed BestBuy from the visuals because it is an extremely erratic dataset that basically bounces around the average of others, but makes the graph nearly unreadable)
16GB DDR5 Crucial RAM
Oct 2025: ~$50
Jun 2026: ~$275
2TB NVME M.2 Crucial SSD
Oct 2025: ~$140
Jun 2026: ~$300 (if you remove Adorama)
512GB NVME M.2 Kingston SSD
Oct 2025: ~$50
Jun 2026: ~$200
$275 - $50 = $225
$300 - $140 = $160
$225 + $160 = $385
Thus, the 2TB variant has an effective ~$385 upcharge due to the RAMpocalypse.
2TB variant MSRP is $1349, thus it would be ~$964 pre-RAMpocalypse, meaning that the RAMpocalypse % upcharge is ~39.9%
Do the same with the 512GB variant:
$275 - $50 = $225
$200 - $50 = $150
$225 + $150 = $375
$375 effective RAMpocalypse upcharge.
MSRP of 512GB variant is $1050, thus it would be ~$675 pre-RAMpocalypse, % upcharge of ~55.5%
Obviously this methodology is not perfectly correct, but I’d argue its quite reasonable ‘napkin math’… you could maybe make a more exhaustive index of all prices of all brands of RAM/SSD in exact performance spec matches to be slightly more accurate, but yeah, roughly, the RAMpocalypse made the Steam Machine, about $380, or 40% to 55% more expensive than it otherwise would have been, depending on 2TB vs 512GB.
Also I guess we are here just assuming Valve is just selling these things basically at cost, neither subsidizing nor gouging the price, in all scenarios, which I am also confident is and always was basically the plan.
Also also, economist brain says:
~50% inflation in less than a year for pretty much an entire segment of the CPI is uh… pretty fucking bad, to use the ‘formal’ terminology.
reasonable given the current situation but not reasonable in general. I’ll wait for prices to go down or my income to go up.
I didn’t get a PS5 when it came out for the same reason. Now it’s more expensive than it was at launch and my wages haven’t changed.
Yeah, we saved for a week, maybe two I don’t remember. I finally saved enough money and my wife bought it as a birthday present for me last year how long was that since release? A couple weeks right. Doesn’t really matter, my friendly local public library has enough cool shit in it to do that I wasn’t wanting for fun. Unless there’s something specific that’s ps5 exclusive you want to play, just get a ps4 and a library card. It kind of feels like blockbuster.
Steam Machine, like our other hardware products, is made up of many components that we source from manufacturers around the world. The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023. That understanding was born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices – primarily, that it tends to get cheaper over time as new technology arrives.
Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we’re sharing today 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.
Price wasn’t the only thing impacted by all of this: availability was as well. There were periods where we found we couldn’t source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this has impacted the number of units we’ve been able to produce for launch.
Also:
If I don’t get a Steam Machine right away, is there anything else I can do?
Thanks to the openness of the PC platform, there are lots of options for devices that will allow you to run games natively or streamed to your TV. There are many PC sites and communities out there that can help you with that. For our part, we are continuing to work toward enabling SteamOS to be used on more hardware than just ours. In fact, with the newly-released SteamOS 3.8, you can run the same code and operating system as Steam Machine on your own living-room PC using whatever PC parts you want:
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/65B4-2AA3-5F37-4227 . Right now, only AMD GPUs are supported, but we’re working on expanding support for the future.
It’s hard to hold the steep price point against Valve when their communication looks like this.
The common Gabe W.
as a not that big a gamer, i was thinking of the Steamdeck to replace my aging Minisforum “desktop”.
I had originally thought of the Framework
with 64GB/2TB
and then move move the Minisforum to some LAN self hosting work (Jellyfin etc) but it has nothing for HDDs aside from external USB3, (and 1x internal NVME and 2x internal SSD) which i am led to believe is problematic
i currently just run a HDD on the router and use Kodi via a Nvidia box to a dumb TV.
I’d love to hear opinions from those with more insight
I run Linux mint on the Minisforum
Steam Machine 512GB: $1,049 USD / 1,509 CAD / 1,039 EUR / 879 GBP / 1,609 AUD / 4,389 PLN
Bundle: Steam Machine 512GB + Steam Controller: $1,128 USD / 1,628 CAD / 1,108 EUR / 938 GBP / 1,728 AUD / 4,698 PLN
Steam Machine 2TB: $1,349 USD / 1,919 CAD / 1,359 EUR / 1,149 GBP / 2,109 AUD / 5,739 PLN
Bundle: Steam Machine 2TB + Steam Controller: $1,428 USD / 2,038 CAD / 1,428 EUR / 1,208 GBP / 2,228 AUD / 6,048 PLN
Both the Steam Machine 2TB and 2TB bundle options come with two additional faceplates: red fabric, and solid walnut.
And if you get the controller bundle, you save $20 over buying it separately.
You also save 9 months of waiting on the pre-order list but neither is a good selling point.
My guess is part of the reason for the controller shortages is they reserved a bunch to do these bundles.
💯
To me, at this point it makes no sense to go with 512gb model, if you pay already that much money. The limitations of 512 is too extreme in my opinion.
And at the price that the 2TB model is, you’d be an idiot to buy it.
You can always replace the storage yourself. A 2TB NVMe doesnt even cost $300 (most are around $250), and if you swapped it yourself, you’d have a 512 GB one to stick into an enclosure and use as a portable hard drive.
And you don’t even have to do that immediately. 512 GB is plenty to start. Especially since not everyone plays enormous AAA games with hundreds of mods. You can upgrade at any time.
It’s worth remembering that most discussions like this are dominated by enthusiasts (including both of us) whereas most people in general are not enthusiasts.
In my experience, most people don’t actively play more than 512GB worth of games at once, and you can add to this with spare microSD cards or other PCs on the network. Steam makes transferring game installs to the main SSD from elsewhere rather painless.
Even as a bit of a data hoarder myself, I only really go beyond 512GB to: 1) keep pace with multiple friend groups that like entirely different game genres I need to all keep available at a moment’s notice, and 2) maintain games modded outside the Steam workshop that I may not play that often but still want to not have to set up more than necessary.
Fuck genAI.
I’m sad (but not surprised) it’s that expensive because I would have jumped on it at 700€, at the same time it encourages me to try and find individual parts for a custom build at the same price with greater theoretical performance
You can probably build a DDR4 system that is a bit cheaper with better performance. It will be even easier if you pick some used components.
Not arguing that you can get slightly better performance for a slightly lower price, but that’s a substantially larger machine. The Steam Machine is little bigger than its controller in any dimension and easy to hide on a shelf; that Q300L is definitely a small desktop. It has niceties like HDMI CEC, so that it can wake your TV when you start it up from its controller. And it’s whisper-quiet.
$70 extra for a really living-room ready games machine does not seem at all unreasonable to me, plus it turns up ready-assembled. If I had to replace my gaming desktop, it doesn’t seem unreasonable. Replacing my gaming desktop would cost about twice what I originally paid for the damned thing as well, but that’s a different matter.
$71 is honestly not that much of a premium once you consider your time putting this together, setting it up, and then constantly having to update becomes your problem
True. For example, not having to worry about drivers, UEFI updates and linux compatibility is a big win.
Sad, but expected
Not Valve fault, but at this point i just feel lucky to have brought the Deck Oled before of all this ram shitshow.
I would really like to have one. But I own a XBOX Series X and realistically that’s fine for me to use. hardware wise, the Steam Machine is not even a big update.
I’ll wait 8 years for the next gen Steam Machine.
