The price of Valve Corporation’s recently announced Steam Machine will not be subsidized, the company has clarified.
During an interview (via Okami13_ on Twitter/X) on Skill Up’s Friends Per Second podcast, Valve’s Lawrence Yang and Pierre-Loup Griffais discussed their newly announced hardware lineup, including the Steam Machine. One of the most pressing questions has been whether the Steam Machine will launch with a subsidized price, similar to how console makers offset hardware costs to increase adoption and software sales. The Valve developers made it clear that this won’t be the case for its new living-room PC
Much of the discussion around the Steam Machine focused on lessons learned from Valve’s first attempt at living-room PCs nearly a decade ago. Back then, the major bottleneck was the limited game catalog on Linux. Porting was difficult, expensive, and offered little incentive to developers. The developers noted that the team realized that “porting games is too hard” and that the library “was not where it needs to be.” This failure ultimately led to the creation of Proton and the Vulkan ecosystem, technologies that now allow the new Steam Machine to run a massive portion of the Steam library without developers having to port their games manually. Thanks to these improvements and years of iteration on SteamOS via the Steam Deck, Valve believes the environment is finally ready for a dedicated living-room device.
When asked directly about pricing strategy, the developers clarified that Valve has no plans to subsidize the Steam Machine. “No, it’s more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”
The developers also noted that many developers are already optimizing UI density, control schemes, and performance scaling for Steam Deck, efforts that will benefit Steam Machine “equally,” since both devices share a common software foundation.
As for how much the Steam Machine will actually cost, Linus Tech Tips’ expected price point of 500 US dollars appears to be highly unlikely. Read about it here.
