Both the upcoming second generation of the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame VR headset will get a verification program for games, a la the Steam Deck. That’s according to Valve, in the latest Steam community update. But the existence of said programs was a given—what you really want to know is when those gadgets will arrive.
This summer, according to Valve.
That would put the official time frame for both devices sometime before the end of September, at least in the most technical sense. But Valve originally hoped to get them out much sooner, or at least nail down a specific launch date and price before February of this year. That didn’t happen, mostly because of the same memory and storage crunch that’s caused the Steam Deck handheld to shoot up in price.
And yeah, price remains the biggest unknown for both the console-style PC and the virtual reality headset. With 16GB of RAM and an 8GB AMD discrete graphics card, the Steam Machine will be far more expensive to make today than it would’ve been a year ago.
For the sake of experimentation, I built a theoretical desktop to the published minimum specs of the Steam Machine using PCPartPicker, minus an operating system. With the cheapest retail parts available around a Ryzen 7600X CPU and Radeon RX 7600 GPU, I hit $1,065… which is honestly less than I was expecting. Assuming Valve can use economies of scale to build the Steam Machine for 25 percent cheaper than that, an $800 price tag is possible. Barely. And that’s assuming Valve is less interested in profit than in creating a beachhead for the Steam platform in the console living room space.
PCPartPicker
But I doubt it’ll shake out like that. Valve needs to build in some wiggle room in its components, as RAM prices are still going up, albeit at a slower pace than they were earlier in the year. Launching at a price under $1,000 and then needing to bump it up immediately to remain in the black would be a pretty terrible look.
And what about that VR headset? Don’t expect a miracle there, either. Though the Steam Frame’s form factor is a Meta Quest-style standalone headset, its hardware is far more advanced. The Steam Frame is based on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Arm chip with 16GB of onboard RAM, similar to Samsung’s Galaxy XR headset… which costs $1,800. Samsung tends to price its own hardware pretty high, but I doubt Valve will be able to chop a significant amount off those components, which include some pricey miniature screens, sensors, controllers, etc.
