Valve's Steam Machine may be selling between 12,000 and 15,000 units per week despite its high price

[KennethL]

I don't get the obsession with size. I have a mid-tower PC in my living room behind the TV. If I had a Steam Machine, it would also go behind the TV. Why does it need to be a small cube? I get why you wouldn't want a giant full size tower, but there are plenty of small cases that can still fit a full size GPU.

Some have a nice living room with expensive furniture and a wife who doesn't want a metal box or that ugly PS5 in the living room. A small cube will maybe pass...

 

[KennethL]

I don't have the advantage of scale or negotiating power of megacorps. There is no reason the steam machine, with such pathetic hardware, should cost this much.

Older but custom AMD CPU and GPU.
Custom motherboard. Custom daughter boards.
Custom case. Custom fan and fan shroud.
Custom heatsink.

Valve doesn't get better prices on SSD and RAM than you do.
But their purchaser didn't do a very good job or they thought the prices would drop and they were wrong. Valve knew how much RAM they needed and they didn't order them before they SM was ready.

My employer purchased 300 sticks of SO-DIMM DDR5 4800MTS in June, almost $300 each. In November 2025 the same sticks were $200 each. In May/June 2025 the were $40 each. We don't know when we need them, our customer makes an order and we purchase the hardware so we can build the finished product.