Cuphead on Steam Machine in the living room
Image: Valve

"Steam Machine expensive". That was the takeaway for most users when the Steam Machine announcement went live, with a $1049 price point that takes the Valve "console" well beyond the realms of even the PS5 Pro. The high price is due to the extortionate cost of memory components like RAM and SSDs, so we asked Valve if these component prices came down, whether they'd consider dropping the price of the Steam Machine commensurately.

Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais was philosophic in his response. "There's no point for us to keep hardware at a high price. It's meant to be an enabler of a stronger connection between people and their games, and not something that we're trying to sell to people for other reasons... [For us], the cheaper the better."

Fellow engineer Yazan Aldehayyat, who has been dealing with the hardware side of the Steam Machine, was a little more cautious. "It's obviously hard for us to predict the future, but we're not optimistic it's going to happen any time soon. Other people in the industry have said as much." You only have to look, for example, at the news that semiconductor company Micron has locked in "historically high prices for five years", in the words of The Register.

Still, Aldehayyat echoed the desire to make the Steam Machine cheaper. "Obviously, we would love to be able to make the Steam Machine more affordable and reach more people, but I don't want to promise to people that it's coming soon. I wouldn't say that this is something that's going to resolve very soon."

Should Valve have delayed the Steam Machine launch?

We've already reported on how Valve sees the Steam Machine launch as "very timely", and that feeds into the same pessimism about how likely it is for price rises to reverse (or even slow) and how that will affect all sorts of gaming machines going forward, from the Steam Machine and prebuilt and DIY gaming PCs to current and future-gen consoles from the likes of Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.

Still, it is nice to get a statement on the record that, should prices start to return to normal, there's an avenue for the Steam Machine to approach their originally-mooted price range. Valve told us that they didn't have a set price in mind for the Steam Machine as they were still sourcing components - Griffais said "in general, we're not saying an exact number there" - but looking at the price rises that affected the Steam Deck gives a "ballpark" idea of where the Steam Machine was originally pitched. That would put the Steam Machine roughly in the $700 range, and perhaps that is a reasonable floor for pricing should the AI bubble burst and a huge number of components return to the DIY and prebuilt PC market.

It's unlikely that we'll see price drops on these components any time soon, as rises look set to continue for at least the short to medium term. What's your view on these comments - and do you think that the Steam Machine has even a tiny chance of becoming more affordable over its lifetime? Let me know in the comments below.