Rumor mill: It's the most debated question in the gaming community right now: how much is Valve going to charge for the Steam Machine when it finally arrives? The answer, according to a reliable leaker, is probably a lot more than you'd think.
Brad Lynch, who has a history of Valve-related leaks, posted a concerning warning on X yesterday.
"Take this with a grain of salt, because it was just whispers in my ear But back when I was told a figure for what Valve's estimated price they'd have to set the starting price of Steam Machine, it was still higher than today's Steam Deck prices.. And that was 2 months ago."
– Brad Lynch (@SadlyItsBradley) May 27, 2026
Yesterday brought the welcome news that the Steam Deck OLED was finally back in stock, but it came with an unfortunate caveat: the price of the 512GB variant has risen from $549 to $789, while the 1TB model has climbed from $649 to $949 – a hefty $300 increase.
Even when it was first announced in 2025, there were questions over the Steam Machine's price and whether it would offer a compelling value proposition compared to a similar PC. And that was before the memory crisis really took hold.
Lynch does include the "take it with a grain of salt" warning in his post, but there are plenty of reasons to believe what he says. Since memory manufactures started allocating production to the high-margin AI industry (the RAMpires, as Linus' Riley Murdoch put it), we've seen price hikes on RAM kits, SSDs, laptops, GPUs, consoles, and more.
When Valve announced the Steam Machine, 16GB of DDR5 would have cost about $50, about the same price as a 512GB SSD. Today, the cheapest single stick of DDR5-4800 on Newegg is priced around $150-$200.
In our This is Why You Won't Buy a Steam Machine in 2026 feature, we estimate that in order for Valve to make a profit on the Linux PC, it would likely have to charge at least $800, if not $900. Based on Lynch's tweet, it's possible that the 2TB Steam Machine model will be $999 or more. That's going to be a hard sell to PC fans for a machine with 16GB of DDR5 and 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM.
A recent report from Insider Gaming claimed that Valve has been "going back and forth internally on pricing and whether they would be willing to take a loss on the cost, at least in the short term." That could be the company's best option right now.
Back in March, Valve insisted that the Steam Machine was still on track to launch this year, though its self-imposed deadline of shipping it in the first half of 2026 is about to pass.