“It’s too dangerous for us to speculate”: Valve don’t know if Steam Machine prices will drop in the future, after admitting that “some people are going to priced out”

Well, that answers that. The new Steam Machine, which Valve have just opened to randomised reservations, starts at £879 / $1049 / €1039 for the base 512GB model, and costs £1149 / $1349 / €1359 for the 2TB version – climbing to £1208 / $1428 / €1428 if you bundle in a Steam Controller. To paraphrase my Steam Machine review stance on those prices: they’re pretty chuffing high, even if the Machine itself is a nicely designed (and unusually specialised) piece of lower-end kit. As for what Valve themselves think, I asked designer Lawrence Yang and engineer Yazan Aldehayyat ahead of today’s sort-of-launch, both of them pointing to the ongoing component pricing/availability hellscape that is RAMnarök. Read more