When the Steam Machine was announced just a few months ago, a lot of the hype around it was deservedly because of the amazing-looking hardware and the knowledge that SteamOS would make for an incredible living room gaming PC experience. However, a great deal of that excitement was also due to the hope that Valve might release the Steam Machine at a price that would rival game consoles. However, a new Steam Machine rumor suggests that won’t be the case.
Despite this rumor, we still expect the Steam Machine to be one of the best gaming PC options available when it lands later this year. You just might want to temper your expectations on how big a dent it will make in your bank balance.
This Steam Machine price rumor comes from a Czech tech retailer called Smarty.cz, which posted a listing for the new device on its website. While no price is shown on the site, Reddit sleuth, Chusskaptaan, spotted that there’s a price listed in the page’s code.
The Redditor’s post reveals that the Steam Machine price on this listing is 19,826 CZK (~$950 USD) for the 512GB model and 22,305 CZK (~$1,070 USD) for the 2TB model. Checking ourselves, these prices still appear in the code, with the company seemingly in no rush to remove it.
One retailer that many US, UK, and other English-language readers might never have heard of wouldn’t perhaps seem like the strongest cause for a rumor. However, Smarty.cz is not only an established retailer in Czechia, but it’s also “the authorized reseller for Valve” products, according to Chusskaptaan.
This Reddit user also spotted that Smarty.cz adds a 17% markup on Valve products, which would put the final likely US equivalent price for the Steam Machine at around $800 for the 512GB model and around $900 for the 2TB model.
As high as these prices are, they are in line with the price levels that I predicted around the time of its reveal. That’s because in terms of raw hardware costs, estimates put the Steam Machine at costing over $500, and once you add in all the other costs associated with actually bringing a product to market at a profit, you’re looking at a $700+ machine.
Crucially, while Valve was able to price the Steam Deck competitively, thanks in part to it relying on users buying more games through Steam and making back any slight losses on the hardware costs in that way, the same doesn’t hold true for the Steam Machine.
That’s because the Steam Deck is much more of a self-contained, optimized unit. While you can side-load Windows and use other game launchers, most users have no interest in doing so, as it’s not a particularly powerful machine, and the handheld SteamOS experience is so much slicker. However, for the Steam Machine, were Valve to subsidize its cost, anyone could just buy it, install Windows, and use it as a normal PC. That’s not a risk Valve can take.
What’s more, while these Steam Machine prices might not be exactly joy-inducing, they’re actually on the lower end of what I feared, especially following all the drastic increases in RAM prices we’ve seen recently. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the entry-level model costing $999, so if this $800 starting price does turn out to be true, it could still be the gaming PC bargain we’d hoped for.
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