Steam Machine Will Likely Not be Priced Competitively With Consoles – Rumour

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Valve has shared some information about the new Steam Machine, but hasn’t said much about how much it will cost. Linus Sebastian from Linus Media Group believes Valve isn’t trying to match the price of gaming consoles. He recently discussed a conversation he had with Valve engineers about the Steam Machine and its expected price on his show, WAN Show.

So, I was listening to Sebastian talk about pitching his idea, and apparently suggesting a $500 price point didn’t go over too well with the company. He doesn’t know what the final price will be, but he admitted that when he said $500, you could just feel the room change – and not in a good way! It definitely shifted the vibe, and he seemed pretty bummed about it.

During an appearance on the WAN Show, Sebastian explained he doesn’t know the device’s price. He had previously expressed disappointment that it wouldn’t be priced like a console – where the hardware cost is lower because the manufacturer takes a cut of game sales. When asked to clarify what he meant by a ‘console price,’ he suggested $500. He noted that the response in the room was noticeably negative after he said that.

The Steam Machine will operate using SteamOS, which is built on Arch Linux, but it’s designed to be a fully open system – meaning it’s not limited to just gaming like a traditional console and can handle other computer tasks. Valve may have accepted lower profits on the Steam Deck to make it successful, but a similarly low price for a Steam Machine could create financial problems for the company.

The Steam Deck is profitable for Valve because people mainly buy it to play games. However, if Valve were to sell a Steam Machine at a very low price, businesses might purchase them in large quantities just to use as basic computers. This could be a problem for Valve, as those machines wouldn’t generate revenue through game purchases on Steam.

Yazan Aldehayyat, a hardware engineer at Valve, recently explained how they chose the components for the Steam Machine. Valve needed to create a powerful yet affordable device, and they used data from the Steam Hardware Survey to find the sweet spot between cost and performance. This survey helped them understand what kind of hardware most players had, allowing Valve to target a reasonable price point.

We also examined the Steam Hardware Survey to get a sense of the performance levels of typical home computers. The results showed that the Steam Machine performs as well as, or better than, 70% of the computers people currently use at home, giving us a good target for performance.

Here’s a complete guide to the Steam Machine, including information on the Steam Controller and Steam Link, which were announced at the same time.

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2025-11-20 15:11