- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
Valve’s Steam Machine finally has a price: a whopping $1,049 for the 512GB configuration or $1,349 for the 2TB version. And those are without bundled controllers, which drive up the cost more.
The prices are so high in part because Valve isn’t subsidizing the hardware, and the company has already indicated that the component crisis forced it to reconsider its initial pricing plans. In an interview with the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, Valve engineers discussed the reality of sourcing RAM in 2026, with take-it-or-leave-it prices as memory and other components remain in short supply, from only a few vendors like Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix.
[…]
Valve, of course, isn’t the only company in a bind over memory shortages, as the crunch is forcing many hardware makers to make significant pricing changes. Even Apple CEO Tim Cook is warning of incoming price hikes for iPhones, Macs, and other devices. And the RAM crunch isn’t projected to get better anytime soon.
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I bought a PNY 2tb drive to upgrade my Steam Deck in August of 2025, it was $95 (USD). Today the 1tb version is $165, 2tb is $290.
just looked up my upgrade.
1TB bought in november 2024
Paid 74€ for it.
Similarly specced ssd costs 210€ today. Fucking hell
Edit: the exact same ssd costs 165-210€
I just checked this today too. A year ago in June I bought two WD Blue 2,5" SSDs for ~165€, shipping included. Today the very same drive is 213€/each at the same store, before shipping.
We buy a decent amount of half TB SSD drives to add to desktop PCs that we sell to customers.
Samsung EVO drives have gone from $47 to $285 in the last year.
While I was looking today I noticed Samsung drives have jumped way more than PNY have.
The PNY 512gb drives were $114, while like you said, Samsung is $285!
Even worse is that I used to be able to get Crucial drives for less than Samsung, and I trust them way more. The Samsung ones are fine, but we’ve never lost a single Crucial SSD in 14 years.
I’ll take a look at the PNY ones. We actually can use 256gb, since these are just backup drives that get a data dump every 5 minutes, so that may save some $.
A year and a half ago, I bought a 4TB Crucial P3 for 251€ ($286 USD), and now it’s currently not even on sale in the same store, but the 2TB version currently costs 407€ ($463 USD). Looking around, I found one that costs 654€ ($745 USD). I wanted to upgrade my RAM, but didn’t have money at the time for it. Then everything happened, and at one point, I saw it go up to 1000€ ($1139 USD). Currently, it’s 560€ ($638 USD).
I do not like the world that we’re living in.
In 2021, I bought 4 4TB bad HDDs for $65 each. I decoded to buy a spare a couple weeks ago in case this shit decides not to stop and an hdd fails since most of my shit is on my NAS. It was $170 for the exact same model.
From 12:48 of the video:
Gamers Nexus: “Were you able to lock in contracts for memory with the suppliers directly or did you have to jump through a bunch of hoops or…”
Rep from Valve: “Look there’s no contract, there’s nothing. Those guys…they are…they give us a price every month, and they say ‘you can buy that many’, and it’s yes or no, and if we say no then they never talk to us again”.
Gamers Nexus also links another video they made specifically about the DRAM cartel.
Actual fucking cartel.
Yes, the current tech industry has made computer hardware into drugs. It’s a sellers market and the buyers that are ordering the largest amounts at the highest prices are AI and data center companies, everyone else gets the left overs at even higher prices.
This really bums me out not cuz I was looking to buy one but because I wanted it to shake the market up and make every company do better for the consumer… I feel like this price takes them completely out of the console market and purely into the entry-level PC market where I think it still is a decent specs and price for that market. It’s just not what it was made to be
I hate micron so much now especially. They basically rug pull all consumers and only sell B2b now. So they can make more money on Ai datacenters.
Problem is there are only a few companies that even sell memory. And micron made it so much worse for the consumer market. I will not forgive, I will not forget.
Yes but giving up profits is not what a company does…
And you say forgive, as if they are your friend or something. Its a corporation. They don’t give a fuck about you as a person.
Almost all corporations doesn’t. There are exceptions. Kagi, the search engine, will give your monthly subscription money back if you didn’t search during the month. How cool is that. That’s someone who actually wants to provide a product users are happy with.
Is this a Kagi ad lmao
Try Kagi today, just use coupon code “SHILL” for 1 month free!
Ngl relatable, I too often mention my interests out of place.
But it’s not out of context. Rather it, merely has an existence in which the distance between in-context and out-of-context disappears, and the topic exist as neither related nor unconnected. A bona fide symphrantasia if you will.
In my commenting career I often make niche, anime poetry references, and searching for them based on the few words I remember can be hard; and that’s why I use kagi, the not-google search engine, start your free trial for 100 searches per month today or upgrade to infinite searches for only $10/month from link below.
symphrantasia
i like your words, magic dude
It’s fine in my opinion. I mention stuff I like and will keep doing that. :)
There are exceptions. Kagi, the search engine
They’re giving money to the homophobic brave search engine because it’s “just politics” and also give money to russian yandex despite their invasion into ukraine
https://mastodon.social/@scy@chaos.social/111704636602291316
https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo/19
Alright. Now let’s talk about what Google is doing. :)
Pretty damn evil company if you ask me.
At some point, you realize that companies will always do things you don’t agree with, and you try to pick the lesser evil.
As for homophobic, i dont know if you mean same sex marriage? The bible clearly says:
Leviticus 18:22: You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.
So to Christian people, its not homophobic, it’s about their beliefs. Clearly religions will have things that you must not do, and this is one of those for Christianity.
Abortion is another hot topic. There are many of these that are not based on hate, but on belief systems. I really think it’s getting too much with calling everyone who doesn’t agree homophobic. It’s the new conspiracy theorist. :)
if you’re a bigot because you think sky daddy told you to be, that doesn’t somehow make you not a bigot
Bigot - a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from his own.
How are you not a bigot with the statement above?
Because they’re not saying you can’t have that opinion, just that you are bigoted for having that opinion.
Hope that helps you! 😊
Yes. We are both biggots. And I think everyone is, looking at that definition.
Only very mature people are tolerant of opinions they dont agree with. Depends of course on what does tolerant mean? If you argue against it, are you tolerant?
I let a lot of people here have their weird opinions. :)
because my pronouns aren’t he/him/his i guess
I really hope China or someone else can step up and just flood the entire market with cheap components eventually.
They are trying. But there is a downside to everything. Once China has full function to basically replace the manufacturing of processors and memory in Taiwan they no longer have anything holding them back from bombing Taiwan into submission. And several incentives to do so to eliminate their competition.
Luckily processors and microchips are a whole other story. They are not near ASML today.
They still sell consumer memory IIRC, just not their own brand. They’ll make DDR5 for others at inflated prices though.
Its always rough when you are dealing with a cartel…
I love how many people are really trying to suck the cartel’s toes in the comments here.
The “UMM ACTUALLYS” are off the charts and stupid.
They must be Nintendo fans too.
I mean sure, but this is a plain supply and demand issue.
I’m not sure why you are getting down votes.
The reasons fur the demand sick, but you are correct, demand is fast outstripping supply… Price rises are inevitable.
Not my downvote, but I get it. The AI cartel bought out the RAM manufacturers. The “AI circle” of companies is definately fucking over the market and not just in ways that lead to them getting their job done. They didn’t just stop making ram. They slowed it wayyy down, causing prices to skyrocket. They will likely make tons of money from the AI memory towers on orders for datacenters that might not even be allowed to exist, but they’re certainly making multiple times more money on their old lines producing the same product they always have.
Yeah, the cartel comment implies price fixing or a monopoly or something, which really isn’t the case. This is really clearly a case of demand going through the roof (for entirely stupid and irresponsible reasons) and supply not being able to meet it.
But that’s what I get for using critical thinking amongst a mob, this is on me.
It can be both. The three RAM manufactures (Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix) have a historical record of price fixing and collusion (I believe Gamers Nexus has some excellent reporting on this). It isn’t just supply and demand, it’s that three sketchy companies have the world over a barrel and may well be using the demand spike to keep prices (artificially) high with the knowledge that nobody else can enter the market and that it takes YEARS and a truly ridiculous amount of money to scale up production to increase supply.
Demand going the roof would be normal.
One company (openAI) to prepurchase all of the next years ram before even produced and you double the prices only from that is a cartel move.
And maybe is the worst to this date, with prices 4x or 5x, but in the past the cartel had other ways to raise prices 2x (2016 was last time for who remember).
Hey, I wouldn’t disagree with that for the most part. But I would still say this is mostly an example of supply and demand.
When supply is so limited that you probably won’t be able to acquire all of a resource that you need, it’s perfectly rational to attempt to secure as much as you can from the next batch, even if that means prepaying to ensure your access.
Now if that buyer is offering higher prices to secure the resource, it’s also perfectly rational for the manufacturer to sell it to them.
We’re going to continue to have this problem as long as that relationship remains the same. No legislation or trade deal or tariff or is going to make a meaningful difference. The only way to solve this situation is to increase supply or decrease demand. Well, I suppose you could outlaw LLM training in every country on earth, but good luck with that.
Saying “supply and demand” as if that settles the issue is reductive. It tells us prices moved, not why the market is structured this way. The real questions are what’s driving demand, who controls supply, and how concentrated power has become. When three suppliers and a handful of effectively unlimited buyers dominate the entire market, with weak or absent regulatory intervention, Econ 101 stops being analysis and starts becoming a thought-terminating cliché.
This all so people can rot their brains out to fruit videos…
And so companies can fire the people who do the work (and hire them back later to fix the damage done by the agentic AI), too. Don’t forget that part.
Hire them back at a lower pay none the less. People will and are desperate for work, so it won’t be difficult.
fruit videos? is there a recent trend I missed?
Godawful AI generated soap opera featuring anthropomorphic fruits.
insert veggie tales meme about the future being AI generated
Damn the verge now just quotes GN? They may as well just link their video without writing anything, lol. They added nothing to this article.
Not that I can read much of it because of the paywall.
paywall
Probably doesn’t help in this case, but check out Bypass Paywalls Clean :)
I prefer Bypass Paywalls Dirty 😈
thanks it’s a bit weird to install but I’ll get it done, I always wanted one that works after 5ftladder stopped working
Doesn’t work on every site, but 13ft ladder is a self hostable replacement
Lol this thing will never die
If you click “read mode” (im on librewolf but any firefox fork will do) you can access the whole article just fine.
Ohh that’s neat!
After reporting how much the Steam Machine costs, I could tell already. RAM manufacturers are in paradise right now!
There’s going to be a bloodbath when the AI bubble finishes popping.
My question is: how far back in time do we have to go to get to where RAM and SSD prices were this high (for a given capacity) in the past? Like 2021?
The last time we saw a price spike like this was when the Chinese adhesives factory caught fire and burned to the ground, those adhesives were used in all kinds of chips.
2013 - but even then it wasn’t this bad.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/06/china-fire-memory-chip-prices
There were also supply chain problems during Covid.
2020-2023:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405896322017293
Well…but @MangoCats@feddit.it isn’t asking about the spike, but about the absolute price.
PC Part Picker’s memory trends page unfortunately only shows the past 18 months. But we can hit archive.org’s Wayback Engine.
First of all, here’s a current level for DDR5-5200 2x16GB:
So about $500 for DDR5-5200 2x16GB.
They only started tracking this category back in early 2022-ish. It looks like it was about $380 then. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $435.14 in 2026 dollars. So it’s probably never been that expensive.
However, that was also when DDR5 was pretty new, and it looks like it started out expensive.
If we look at DDR4, which might be more interesting, since we can go back further and avoid the initial spike:
Looking at DDR4-3200 2x8GB, it’s come down a bit, but looks like it peaked at about $190.
Inflation-adjusted, that’s $144 in 2019 dollars.
It looks like that was about April 2019 when DDR4 exceeded the peak from the last few weeks.
That’s what I was thinking: early COVID, and it’s not so much about the price spike relative to where it was, but the absolute dollars per GB pricing which has been persistently falling for decades - I doubt you have to go past 2021 to get to higher prices per GB, and that was for slower speeds too…
Per gb price of ram is now almost 50% higher than during the peak of COVID price spike that lasted just 3 months. I’m comparing the current gen at the time - ddr4 during COVID vs ddr5 now
If we look at this on the basis of “how much does it cost to put a typical amount of RAM and storage in your computer?” then I bet we’d be going all the way back to the 90s.
Like seriously.
Much longer than that. There was a spike in 2021 that brought high end 2x8gb ddr4 kits to about $180-200 but that’s still significantly less than what you pay for decent ddr5 now. I think you’d have to look to back to early DDR3 or even further to DDR2 prices to get higher per gb amounts.
SSD prices were this high briefly (2-3 months) mid-2021. Before that you’d have to look all the way back to times where 1tb was the largest consumer grade SSD you could buy
On the DDR4 RAM front, it looks like pre-2019 is where RAM was higher than it is today, in (broad market measured) inflation adjusted dollars.
If RAM prices are so bad, couldn’t Valve give an option to order a Steam Machine with no RAM? So that people could use RAM they already have or buy some locally for a lower price.
I get where you’re coming from. The average person doesn’t know how to build a PC, and this is marketed as a plug and play device. Probably wouldn’t be worth the support calls, returns, compatibility issues etc when people accidentally buy the wrong one.
Probably decided not to do that. I’m curious of their reason(s).
It’s not worth it to offer it. The steam machine is going to sell out regardless of the price, just like the steam deck did even after the price hikes. Not because there’s going to be such demand, but because supply is still constrained.
A model without RAM is going to cost valve extra to support (troubleshooting and whatnot), so why bother when you can just sell the unit that comes with the RAM.
Is it? It’s not like Valve has shut down the ‘pre-order’ page. If they already manufactured the devices, they should of had lower RAM prices, and if they haven’t completed manufacturing and have to pay elevated pricing, seems like a device that you don’t release currently. Especially since the device is mostly off the shelf parts, and SteamOS improvements have been the real selling point. I am not sure what Valve is thinking, releasing a device that underperforms a PS5 Pro, which is $200 less and comes with a 2TB drive and a controller.
Valve has zero obligation to throw gamers a bone, but the pricing on the Steam Machine seems incredibly bone headed., especially with as much competition for handhelds in that price bracket which will perform similar to the Steam Machine and have screens and controllers built in. And many of them you can install SteamOS on and have the same experience.
So here’s the thing. Right off the bat it’s hard to take you seriously when you don’t even seem to understand how the pre-order works for the Steam Machine – and that’s even with me agreeing with at least some of your overall sentiment. What compelling reason would they have to shut down the pre-order page earlier than advertised?
Honestly, none of us really know for sure 100% factually whether the Steam Machine will sell out or not, but it’s hard to take your questioning of it seriously when your understanding is so limited, and that’s the nice way of putting it.
Personally, I won’t be surprised either way. I suspect it will sell out, but like you, me, and millions (billions?) of other people, I also know that the price is laughable when appraised only by specs and anticipated performance metrics, so it also would not surprise me if they struggle with sales.
I feel sorry for them for the team that designed this. They had all this shit ready to go and then the RAM and SSD prices went through the roof, and tbh if you’re speccing a machine for mass production, those seem like the bits that were always gonna be cheaper by the time it comes to actually building it. Why would they ever go up? They never have before.
It was a nice idea, but the timing had completely fucked it. I don’t think it was ever going to compete with the PS5 on price, but right now it’s barely even competing with PC on price…
Even the Steam Deck isn’t competitive any more.
This is what shows in Steam when you search for it.
This is all you can buy.
The point of shitty old processors was to get them cheap. Now that RAM and storage are the biggest factors, they could have gone with newer processors and not be significantly more expensive but significantly more performant.
It’s weird how supply chains work, and how design changes are at the very start of a very long process that makes changing the design now a very costly, risky thing.
changing the design now
Not now. When RAM prices started skyrocketing. That wasn’t only today or yesterday.
It was still well after the hardware was designed.
Companies like Asus fart out new designs every year. It’s doable if the design pipeline if efficient enough.
Key word: fart out
Not starting from scratch. Those are planned out years in advance.
Not everyone wants a mediocre upgrade.
What the other responders have said aside, are you seriously comparing a hardware focused company the size of Asus to Valve who’s hardware business is more of a side thing?
The Steam Machine uses semi-custom processors. Changing them would have required getting AMD to design new chips, not swapping out off-the-shelf parts. AMD doesn’t yet have an RDNA4 replacement for the GPU, so they would probably only go up to RDNA3.5, and that might not have been enough of a boost to even be worth the trouble.
The Steam Machine uses semi-custom processors.
Steam Machine uses old crap AMD had lying around. This is also why it’s not an APU design.
Literally on the Steam Machine page:
- CPU: Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
- GPU: Semi-custom AMD RDNA3 28CUs
Were you 100% certain this problem was going to last as long as it has? Yeah, neither was anyone else.
Eh, the writing was on the wall the moment DRAM manufacturers refused to expand capacity and instead stopped consumer sales in favour of corporate batch sales.
Of course. And it will last for years.
In the total project timeframe it takes to design and produce a machine, that is now.
Ram prices started skyrocketing in September, around when Valve had announced their hardware for early 2026.
Was already way too late to change the design, it would have meant scrap the SMachine and go back to the drawing board.
Shitty, old processors? In which way?
Zen 4 is literally just a single generation behind current latest gen architecture. And you’re way off on the pricing too - Zen5 APUs are essentially the AI 300/400 lineup, of which the higher end models still cost well over what Valve would find affordable. Meanwhile the GPU Valve chose to be integrated into the SM is 30-40% more performant than the 890M bundled with the Ryzen AI 370 (the only affordable kinda-high-end Zen5 APU).
So no, it’s neither old nor shitty.
The entire cooling system is designed around those processors. Changing them would delay the Steam Machine by multiple years. Also, those processors may be old (or more accurately, based on an older architecture), but they’re certainly not shitty.
Sure. Fans work totally different when there’s a slightly newer processor.
Wasn’t that assumption part of why the i9 MacBooks a few generations back had massive heating issues?
The fans and heatsinks weren’t enough to cool the i9, even though they were fine with the i7, so performance would quickly go into the floor when they started throttling.
I used to have a near maxed out 2019 i9 mbp. The 2020 base model m1 blew it out of the water performance-wise.
Granted, a big part of that was the apple silicon, but the i9 was supposed to be a powerhouse. It just wound up spending most of its time thermally throttled.
That’s why I buy used, much easier to negotiate. I’m not really a Dodge guy though, and I don’t need a big truck anyway.
Har har. It’s not dodge anymore
Seeing the LTT video where they build their own PC with similar parts (but slightly better) for the same price was really the nail in the coffin for this one. The performance of the SMachine makes the value proposition… lackluster.
The only redeeming quality is the form factor. Would definitely fit very well in a living room. Would it make a good couch party game machine ?
The form factor is a big factor though. Some people don’t want or can’t afford the space a giant metal box takes up.
Not only that but they’re dealing with another legal headache claiming they’re a monopoly which is part of why they aren’t subsidizing it. One of the staff members did say they’re considering selling them with RAM/SSDs which if they do will significantly reduce the price.
