Evaporated Steam

But Valve’s push to compete directly with Microsoft and PC hardware makers has hit a wall, at least for now: huge cost increases and supply increases for all kinds of PC components, particularly memory and storage chips.

Problems that started to affect the market for PC components in late 2025 are now being felt across the entire consumer tech industry. Chip manufacturers are all chasing the generative AI gold rush, which has an all-consuming need for memory, storage, GPUs, and (increasingly) even CPUs. This means less manufacturing capacity for the components that go into consumer-grade hardware, and more fighting over the supply that’s left. Prices that were already being pushed upward by the Trump administration’s now-illegal tariffs are now being pushed upward by shortages instead.

This has been particularly rough for anybody trying to make inexpensive or low-margin hardware. Game console price cuts, already a thing of the past thanks to the death of Moore’s Law, have given way to price hikes instead. Companies like Raspberry Pi and Framework have raised prices multiple times this year; even Apple, which has historically been able to secure favorable prices for component purchases thanks to its sheer size, has been having problems.

For Valve, these problems have not only indefinitely delayed the Steam Machine (“the first half of the year” is still the plan, giving Valve two months to figure it out), but have also rendered the 4-year-old Steam Deck largely unpurchasable. Third-party handheld makers have raised prices and indefinitely delayed products, taking away another potential source of first-time SteamOS users.

It was always sort of hard to see how the Steam Machine would compete with consoles on price, and that’s still probably true even though consoles now cost a fair amount more than they did a couple of years ago. Even if it does launch, and even if Valve can keep it in stock, it may not be available at a price that most people are actually willing to pay.