On November 12 2025, Valve announced a new family of Steam Hardware, the Steam Machine, the Steam Controller and the Steam Frame.
I’m not gonna go over the specs, plenty of news have done that already. What I want to go through is what I think Valve should be doing instead of what they’ll most certainly do.
Fix the poor availability
A large problem related to selling things is how available they are. And Valve has faced this issue with their hardware. It is impossible to buy it outside of a few regions, and for ages, you had to be inside North America to buy them. I remember the time they made the Steam Link with the original Steam Controller (v1), and it was only in a few regions.
With the Steam Deck, availability is still very much poor, and it has improved only slightly recently. The list of supported countries you can buy it is not good enough for a company with the size and visibility of Valve. Not even China, Valve’s second biggest market (probably the first!) is on the list.
So yeah, fix this, immediately. Make it available to retail channels and for more regions/countries. Scalpers will always exist, and the way to fight it is to make available for more retail channels, and for the price it was announced for, instead of closing the hand tighter. There’s no reason for this.
8GB VRAM
Yeah, Valve. You need to change that.
The Steam Machine looks fine, a R5 7400F with a cutdown RX 7600 isn’t too bad. But the 8GB VRAM isn’t enough. Sure, you can use FSR to get upscaled 4K but what about next gen titles? Or even current gen ones? This thing should have 12GB VRAM at a minimum and desirably 16GB.
Pricing
No prices were announced but it’s because of tariffs, obviously. The Nintendo Switch 2 did the same thing.
If I was gonna make any predictions, here’s what I’d love for Valve to charge for each of these.
Steam Machine
Valve said that the Steam Machine is gonna be priced as an ‘entry-level PC’, which can mean anything, nice vague statement there. But hey, I know what they could do for the pricing: 700 for the 512GB version and 800 for the 2TB version.
This is because its direct competition will be other mini-PCs with similar specs or even newer ones with better specs. So striking a balance is key. The Mac Mini costs 700 USD, so why not just do that?
Since Valve will do a bundle with the Steam Controller, I’d say these prices (in USD):
- 700: Steam Machine (512gb)
- 750: Steam Machine (512gb) + Steam Controller
- 800: Steam Machine (2TB)
- 850: Steam Machine (2TB) + Steam Controller
For the record, a Beelink SER9 Pro with Ryzen 7 255H (or something like that) is 710USD (on discount when I checked it) and a Beelink EQR6 with a Ryzen 5 6600U is 440USD. A 700 USD Steam Machine with its own dedicated GPU would be a killer price. Oh and a Beelink GTR9 Pro with that beefy Strix Halo APU costs 2800USD.
Steam Controller
There’s no way that this controller isn’t higher than 60 or 70 USD. That’s how much the others charge, that’s how much Valve should charge for it at max. Maybe 40 or 50 if they feel like undercutting the competition.
Steam Frame
This is where it gets a bit more complex, because the Steam Frame is Valve’s Meta Quest 3 mixed with some bits of the Quest Pro. The Pro didn’t sell for 1500 USD or even 1000 USD so these price points aren’t gonna be useful for the Frame.
If anything, something close to 700 would make it work, and it should top out at that. I’d say that 550 would be best spot for it, because the Quest 3 costs 500 at the lowest and 650 at the highest, and since the Frame is the Quest 3’s direct competitor, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be the same price. Maybe make it 50 USD more, so 550 and 700, and Valve might get something out of it.
Closing Words
I like Valve’s idea for hardware but they absolutely need to improve availability, up the VRAM in the GPU of the Steam Machine and price correctly. With all of these three things done, I’d like to say that Valve does have a chance to disrupt a few markets, all at once.