The Steam Machine Has a Price, and It’s a Lot: $1,049 to Start

Valve has finally put a number on the Steam Machine, its living-room SteamOS box, and the number is going to start an argument. The 512GB model is 1,049 dollars without a controller. The 2TB version is 1,349 dollars, again without a controller, or 1,428 dollars if you add the new Steam Controller. Preorders open June 25 and it launches June 30.

For the money you get a genuinely capable little PC. Inside is a semi-custom AMD platform: a six-core, twelve-thread Zen 4 CPU clocked up to 4.86 GHz, an RDNA 3 GPU with 28 compute units and 8GB of GDDR6 inside a 110-watt envelope, 16GB of DDR5, and your choice of a 512GB or 2TB NVMe drive, with a microSD slot for more. Valve pegs it at roughly six times the performance of a Steam Deck, which is a meaningful jump, and it runs SteamOS, so it boots straight into the couch experience rather than a Windows desktop.

I have a foot in both camps on this one. The thing I genuinely like is the philosophy: an open, off-the-shelf, upgradeable PC built for the television, running a Linux-based OS that does not lock you into a walled garden. That is the right kind of platform for the long haul, and against the backdrop of Sony quietly backing away from PC the same week, the contrast is hard to miss.

The thing I cannot get past is the price. At over a thousand dollars before you have paid for a controller, the Steam Machine is competing with a self-built mini PC and a Steam Deck that already lives in your bag, and the launch is gated behind a preorder lottery for people who bought something on Steam before late April. It is special, and it is expensive, and both of those are true at once. Announced back in November 2025 alongside the Steam Controller and the Steam Frame headset, it is finally real. I just wish it cost less.