‘This doesn’t have RAM’: Valve explains why Steam Controller is releasing before Steam Machine

Valve has confirmed that its new Steam Controller will release on May 4 and explained why the peripheral is arriving before its Steam Machine PC.

On Monday, Valve confirmed that the Steam Controller will be available beginning May 4 at 10 am PT in the US, UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, priced at $99 USD / $149 CAD / €99 / £85 / $149 AUD.

The release follows a lengthy wait for Valve’s new hardware range, which also includes the Steam Frame VR headset, after the company confirmed in February that the rapidly increasing price of PC components had delayed its announcement of pricing and release details.

Speaking in a new interview with Polygon, Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali explained why Valve has now decided to release the Steam Controller ahead of its other hardware, stating that it saw little sense in holding back the peripheral while the components shortage continued.

“This doesn’t have RAM in it, and it’s not as complicated to start getting out the door for us,” he said. “We’re ready for it. We wanted to build up quantity so that we could try to address everybody who wants one at launch, but it’s possible that the demand for it far exceeds our expectations.”

Since Valve’s new hardware products were first announced late last year, memory prices have increased significantly worldwide, with DRAM contract prices reportedly increasing by over 170% year-over-year.

However, although the climate has disrupted Valve’s plans, Cardinali claimed that the staggered release wasn’t entirely out of step with how it planned to release its three new products.

“From the beginning, these were all different products,” he said. “We had always thought, obviously we want them to work together well — especially the Steam Machine and the Steam Controller, they’re in a lot of ways a pair made in heaven — but we saw no need to ship the Controller at the same time as the Machine.

“The really only hard deadline is we didn’t want to ship the Steam Machine before the Steam Controller. We want to have that out for the Steam Machine… It wasn’t really ever the plan to ship them together unless it landed nicely that way. So there’s no point in holding it back while we work through the other stuff.”