The whispers surrounding the Steam Machine price have turned out to be true as Valve has confirmed it will not be a cheap offering like gaming consoles. The confirmation came during an interview with Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais on Skill Up’s Friends Per Second podcast. This is disappointing news for those who were expecting the new Steam gaming cube to be affordable like a PlayStation or Xbox. Instead, the Steam Machine price is said to be in line with the “current PC market”.
Steam Machine Price to Match a PC With Comparable Specs
Valve unveiled its new hardware lineup, including the Steam Machine, about a couple of weeks ago. It is a cube-shaped gaming device aimed at making PC gaming portable. It revealed key specifications of the machine but refrained from sharing anything about the price. Griffais has now shared that even though the Steam Machine price is yet to be decided internally, it is confirmed to match a PC with comparable specifications.
Griffais said,
“I think that if you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at. Ideally, we’d be pretty competitive with that and have a pretty good deal, but we’re working on refining that as we speak, and right now is just a hard time to have a really good idea of what the price is going to be because there’s a lot of different things that are fluctuating.”
He further went on to deny the possibility of the Steam Machine being a subsidized product. The reason for that is said to be features like a small size and low noise levels that are hard to build if someone were to make their own gaming PC using parts. Valve is said to be excited for people to discover “how quiet this thing is”.
A gaming console can be grabbed for around $500-$600 in the current market, except for the PlayStation 5 Pro, which costs around $750. This suggests the Steam Machine price could be set around $800-$850 for the base storage. This is speculative pricing, but it goes without saying that it is the pricing that will make or break the device’s customer base.
