Valve has clarified its strategy for its new Steam Machines, announcing that they will not be cheap products. In fact, the company’s pricing policy is in line with PC market prices. So don’t expect machines that are deliberately affordable, especially given current memory prices.
Steam Machine: watch out for prices!
Broadly speaking, we learn that Valve doesn’t want to apply the same strategy as Sony or even Microsoft with its consoles. Indeed, PlayStation and XBox manufacturers apply deliberately low prices to attract customers, and then sell them games at premium prices, or Gamepass or PlayStation Plus subscriptions.
But this won’t be the strategy of Valve, which has opted for a more… Classic approach, with prices in line with the industry and component costs. So, with memory prices on the rise, Valve’s machine could well become even more expensive, especially when 32GB DDR5 kits threaten to reach €400 this week, which is bound to have an impact on the final price of the Steam Machine.
Valve justifies this strategy not only by its choice of configuration, but also by the fact that it would be very difficult to reproduce the machine itself. Valve’s configuration also adopts a compact format and is based on semi-custom components such as the six-core CPU based on Zen 4 architecture, all integrating an RDNA 3 iGPU with 28 compute units. Finally, in addition to its compactness, the device is designed for silent operation. Finally, the console/PC comes with SteamOS, a system closely linked to the hardware.
For all these reasons, Valve has chosen to sell its console based on the PC market price. And so, no, don’t expect a €400 bill, especially when you know that they outperform 70% of PCs on the market!
