Bad news for gamers: the much-hyped Steam Machine, long rumored to see the light of day in the first half of 2026, may be delayed even longer due to memory and storage shortages and the astronomically high prices these shortages are pushing on to consumers.
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With the expansion of artificial intelligence, gaming hardware manufacturers have to compete for memory, storage, and graphical processing power with the deep pockets of Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, all of whom are racing to outcompete one another and win the AI race.
As recently as February, Valve made some concessions to this reality in a blog post:
Mashable Light Speed
“When we announced these products in November, we planned to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you’ve likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame).”
For the unaware, the Steam Machine is Valve’s latest attempt to leverage its dominant software position in the PC gaming market into hardware, promising what amounts to a budget gaming PC with the form factor of a gaming console allegedly priced under $1,000 but still capable of offering “4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR” with either 512GB or 2TB of native storage, expandable via microSD, and running on their proprietary SteamOS.
In their “Steam Year in Review 2025” update, Valve initially wrote that they “hope to ship in 2026,” potentially indicating that the launch of the Steam Machine and its key accessories, the Steam Frame VR headset and controller, would be delayed until next year, but they have since amended the sentence to be more optimistic: “we will be shipping all three products this year.”
While that almost certainly means we will have to wait until the second half of 2026, it also helps keep the hope alive among gamers hoping for a better budget gaming experience.
