Valve: Steam Machine pricing be “pretty competitive” with equivalent PCs

PC games giant Valve has said that its recently announced Steam Machine hardware will be a “good deal” when it comes to price.

That’s according to software engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais, who appeared on Skill Up’s Friends Per Second podcast to discuss the tech, saying that at the moment it does not have a price internally at Valve.

The developer added that the aim was to offer consumers a “good deal” for the level of performance that the Steam Machine is set to provide.

“I think that if you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” he said.

“Ideally, we’d be pretty competitive with that and have a pretty good deal, but we’re working on refining that as we speak, and right now is just a hard time to have a really good idea of what the price is going to be because there’s a lot of different things that are fluctuating.”

Griffais was pressed on whether Valve would be prepared to subsidise the cost of the Steam Machine in order to bring the price down – a very common business practice for platform holders – but this is not part of the company’s plan.

“No, it’s more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market,” he said.

“Obviously, our goal is for it to be a good deal at that level of performance. And then you have features that are actually really hard to build if you’re making your own gaming PC from parts.

“Things like the small form factor and I think the noise level that we achieved or lack thereof is really impressive and we’re excited that the people are going to find out how quiet this thing is.”

This approach would be in keeping with Valve’s previous hardware launches, like the Valve Index, which launched at $999 and never received any significant discount even as rival hardware manufacturers cut prices. The Steam Deck was priced competitively at launch, which company president Gabe Newell described as “painful”, but the company is not believed to have lost money on sales.

The Steam Machine was one of three new pieces of hardware that Valve announced earlier in November, along with the Steam Frame VR headset and Steam Controller gamepad.

The Steam Machine itself runs the Linux-based SteamOS previously seen in the company’s Steam Deck hardware and will be six times more powerful than that handheld tech. No release window has been given, but it is set to launch in 2026.