- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- games@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- 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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They don’t realize that they drive away customers to upcoming competitors long-term? Only short-term grift in view?
So like… genuine question: what do you propose they do? Operate at a loss indefinitely? Go into an industry they have zero experience and domain knowledge in and just “build a factory”? And industry, I should add, that is probably the single most complicated and technically - as well as capex - intensive industry that humans have thus far derived? What’s the play here? Drive themselves to bankruptcy out of altruism?
Two realistic options. One, depends if the devices are already manufactured. If yes, you sell them at the prices when you manufactured them. That shows good will for the community, and gets devices out and people wanting to buy in to a niche product.
If they haven’t manufactured the devices, then the answer is easy, you simply won’t be making them because they are too expensive to get a large run in until prices go down.
The bigger problem though is the old off the shelf hardware being used here is going to age out incredibly fast. So a third option would be what many of the minipc companies are doing, and give an option for barebones, and let you bring your own RAM and SSD. No option is perfect, but just raising prices higher than a PS5 Pro with no controller and worse performance, you aren’t winning over new customers, and you are pushing your old customers away.
At the same time, standing still and doing nothing is a recipe for someone else to eat their lunch.
My point is that Valve is fundamentally a for-profit company, not a charitable organization. Expecting them to do nothing in response to the wildest market disruptions that the consumer hardware industry has ever seen is frankly unrealistic.
At the end of the day, Valve has been successful because they have been able to balance strategic, long term profitability with providing a genuinely good service at a reasonable market price to the vast majority of their customers. Note that that is specifically not giving things away at cost (as nice as that might be in the short term for customers. In the long run, zero (or negative) profitability would mean Valve ceases to exist.
I’m not trying to suckle at the corporate teat here - I’m simply pointing out that pretending Valve isn’t a corporation is flat out delusional. Not to mention, everyone else’s prices are going to be spiking too. They’re not “the bad guys”, and they will absolutely not be the only ones doing it.
I mean, Valve has been successful solely because they have cornered the game distribution market. Their hardware has done essentially zero for their bottom line. They could have simply never release this product (as they didn’t for the original Steam Machine) in a realistic sense, and been done with it.
Their hardware (pointedly, the steam deck) has begun a diametric shift towards Linux gaming. The fact that our fuckwit Captains of Industry are pinning the throttle and driving at a wall, and in the process gutting the consumer electronics market is, ultimately, just really awful luck and timing. If it weren’t for that, I dare say Valve would be looking at becoming a Serious Player in the hardware market. As it stands, this will certainly significantly stymie the adoption of the GabeCube… but I hope that ultimately, when the market stabilized (or corrects) in time, they’ll still be on track to do that.
It takes a minimum of about 3 years to set up chip factories and longer to ramp up production, so it’s likely they think of this as a problem for the next CEO.
That’s not even the issue, it simply isn’t worth it for chip manufactors to ramp up production.
Chip manufacturing is so expensive that machines have to run at 100% capacity to make reasonable profit margins from consumer hardware. Investment in new factories is only worth it if the demand stays high for 10+ years, which simply doesn’t seem to be the case. Most AI companies will collapse in the next few years and while AI in itself will probably survive, the hardware craze will eventually die down a bit.
Holy moly, we’ve raised a generation of idiot leaders.
Yes but how’s that something for Valve to solve (I am a bit lost to this thread’s train of thought)
Off-topic
This way they can rent put computer instead of you owning the means to do so yourself. This is what happens when you price out consumers. You bind them to your terms with leverage to pay for your past Investments payed by future earnings.
I mean, how long does a consumer CPU last? 10 years? 15? Datacenter measures don’t count, since they always push 100% load at max feasible temperature. And RAM holds even longer. And DDR3 is good enough for general computing, even with all the bloat.
I am gaming on ddr4 RAM and an rtx2070 from 2015. However CPU loads are high running a lot of games. I got a few friends who want to upgrade their motherboard but can not reasonably afford ddr5. Most of my non-gaming acquaintances do not own anything more than a phone or tablet anymore.
The RTX 2070 came out in late 2018 though
Yeah, the weakness of the “this is all a massive conspiracy to force consumers to rent all their computing power” theory is that old computers work just fine as long as you don’t try and install a newer Windows.
We’re maybe 2 decades past the point were you had to upgrade your PC every 5 years for it to be suitable for everyday computing usage. There are only two things pushing PC hardware upgrades nowadays:
- OS support time limits and the ever expanding bloat of newer OS versions (which is nowhere as much a problem if your OS is Linux)
- Games
Now, for Games, all attempts at getting gamers to have their games hosted in servers and playing on light PCs - most notably Stadia - failed miserably.
As for OS, how successful has Microsoft been at getting people to actually upgrade to Windows 11, especially since hardware prices shot up?
I think it’s far more likely that people just keep on using their aged hardware more often than not with no longer updated OS versions, than it is for them to actually start paying subscriptions to use remote computing power to browse the web and read their e-mails, especially since that still needs some form of local hardware so doesn’t totally solve their problem with expensive hardware.
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.
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?
Not starting from scratch. Those are planned out years in advance.
Not everyone wants a mediocre upgrade.
Key word: fart out
In the total project timeframe it takes to design and produce a machine, that is now.
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.
Of course. And it will last for years.
Many people were expecting the AI bubble to last well into 2029
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.
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.
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.
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
So we thought we’d just kick it to the customers
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
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
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.
Bought a 256GB ssd for like 320€ in around 2011 (maybe 2012) so there’s that.
Yeah, over the years I tend to spend about $200 on storage when I buy - it’s just that the storage has been getting bigger and bigger for that price over the decades.
Totally, and cheaper, well I guess my 3TB, 4TB (under 100€ each) and finally 2TB SSD (200€?) will be the last for a long time lol!
Shouldn’t China have compatible production lines ready in two or three years?
Hard to know how all that will be playing out, a lot of the recent craziness has been a great excuse for China and other places to ramp up production to address loss-of-supply issues.
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
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.
And the RAM crunch isn’t projected to get better anytime soon.
Projections by whom? What timeframe does “soon” cover?
With increasing objections, blocking, and cancellations of data centers, and some big-name AI companies going public soonish, and the recent OpenAPI finance press… it could be “soon”, within a few months, that it could get better. It’s certainly not a certainty, maybe even unlikely, and can’t be “projected” from the current RAM market alone, but if you want to hope…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 sketchiest 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.
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.
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
is it really that more expensive? because unlike a console the steammachine doesnt require a subscription to play online. PS5+ is 150€ yearly just for that. granted, you get a game per month but the games you get are often games you wouldnt buy anyways. so with the current price of 900€ for a 2tb ps pro youll pay 900€. after 3 years the steam machine is cheaper.
“After 3 years” lol. You’re also not mentioning that even the base ps5, which was released 6 years ago, performs better than a Steam Machine.
You’re also comparing against the most expensive PS+ plan. The base one is about 80 per year so you’d “break even” in what? 6 years? What a joke.
You’re also not mentioning that even the base ps5, which was released 6 years ago, performs better than a Steam Machine.
is that based on the specs or some reviews somewhere ?
Yeah, it’s close but the ps5 was released 6 years ago and it’s cheaper. The Steam Machine’s bang for buck is awful. It’s a pc with console limitations and a pc price.
What console limitations? it’s a full PC.
Hardware console limitations. Everything but the SSD and RAM is proprietary and you can’t upgrade it. Heck, it doesn’t even have an audio output. The I/O sucks hard.
Yeah not having an audio port is a bit shit especially if this is suppose to be a plug n play type of deal. At least the consoles allow you to use the controllers for audio.
Early reviews are saying that the Steam Machine and PS5 perform similarly, with the PS5 being a smoother experience overall due to automatic framescaling. And that’s with something that’s 6+ years ago.
yeah there’s a bunch f performance bumps you can get with a fixed end platform and a whole company invested in making games that run on their platform perform well.
What the fuck do people even play on a PS5… Ubisoft sandboxes? Pass.
This is such a braindead take that I really don’t even know where to start.
I compared it to the yearly plan that showed up first. i was honestly not aware that there are different subscription tiers. when i used ps+ with the ps4 there was only one + as far as i know.
the power of the machine is dissapointing and i commented before comparing the ps5+ specs with the SM.
on the other side could it be a ok device if you want that formfactor, long softwaresupport and still have a pc that can be used for more than just playing games or watching tv. Especially if youre not into AAA-gaming and more into Indie or Emulators. There you‘ll get a bigger Library than from a regular Console.
the price is also arround 7% more if you choose the SM over a comparable DIY according to gamers nexus so it seems fair i guess?
that being said i think the current SM is more a niche product and not for the masses.
The form factor is slightly smaller than itx and you can buy a pre-built itx pc. Software support is ridiculous, that’s already a feature in every pc and OS.
Also, I don’t think the price is ok at all. If you’re going to take away upgradeability, it needs to be a lot cheaper than diy.
I worry that this is going to be so niche that it’ll die a very quick death.
yes. softwaresupport is a feature in every pc but not for consoles. this thing dies once its hardware dies or is so outdated you couldnt run a game anymore.
a ps5 dies once the newer console releases, because there are no games coming anymore.
but yes. i hoped that it would be more than that, but it seems like valve hoped for more too.
Except that the steam machine is not a console? It’s just a linux pc with a UI that can be navigated with a controller. You can just install bazzite and achieve the same result. Software support could actually be worse for the steam deck, considering that it has a semi-custom apu.
Be honest, when was the last time you wanted to use a pc and couldn’t because it didn’t have drivers? Heck, my first server a little over a year ago was using a 15 year-old i5 2400, and it worked just fine for a simple file server + jellyfin with the arr stack and direct playback.
yes. thats why it isnt priced as one, but still gets compared to a console because it wants to compete with thwm in the living room.
soo fun story regarding drivers. my notebook from work doesnt support my docking station at home anymore after a upgrade to win 11 from 10. My linux pc works just fine. its a tablet though and has some unsupported hardware like gyro sensors.
but thats not the point. the point is, that valve still updates its distro for the steamdeck and keeps improving it years after the launch.i expect the same for the SM. compare that to the asus ally: 1 year after release and asus dropped its support if i remember correctly.
Online is free with the caveat that some games might not allow it at all…
you wouldnt play most of these games on a htpc though if you have to compete with keyboard and mouse on a controller. also its still possible to install windows on it, if its such a problem.
that being said the price for the performance is still too high and i wouldnt recommend it to nom tech people. (i commented before comparing the specs to the ps5 pro)
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 :)
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
I prefer Bypass Paywalls Dirty 😈
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!
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.
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.
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 $.
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.
Just wait until there is a rice and wheat shortage. These negotiations are child’s play compared to mass death from starvation due to global political instability. But yeah…RAM.
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.
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.
