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In a year marked by severe component price hikes and shortages, Valve is still determined to release Steam Machine and Steam Frame by the end of summer. The company confirmed as much as it announced the expansion of its Verified program, which goes into effect today despite neither Steam Machine or Steam Frame having a firm release date.
Valve’s Verified program categorises Steam games based on their performance on Valve’s hardware and compatibility with Proton, which makes it possible for Windows games to run on Linux. The Verified system was introduced with the release of Steam Deck, but will now expand to account for the new hardware. We learned a bunch about these changes at GDC, but overall: if a game works well on Steam Deck it’ll work well on Steam Machine.
Interestingly, devs are being asked to use the Steam Deck to ensure compatibility in the absence of Steam Machine dev kits, as per the Steamworks documentation. “Steam Machine dev kit units are not currently available. The best way to ensure compatibility on Steam Machine is to work on your title’s compatibility with Steam Deck. If your game runs well on Deck, it will also run well on Machine with no extra work required from you.”
Steam Deck dev kits were available to studios in advance of its February 2022 release, and Steam Frame dev kits are already out in the wild. Is the absence of Steam Machine dev kits an indication of just how tightly Valve is rationing its access to components?
Whatever the answer may be, the fact that Valve still plans to release its hardware at all will come as a relief to those willing to fork out for what will likely be costly pieces of kit. The AI industry’s run on DRAM and NAND memory has caused widespread scarcity and massive attendant hikes in prices. Even the Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation 5 have received dramatic price increases in 2026. I wouldn’t be surprised if Valve simply said: “The time isn’t right, let’s put these things on ice for now.”
Though Valve hasn’t set a price for Steam Machine, it seems increasingly unlikely that it’ll be cheap. PC Gamer’s hardware editor Jacob Ridley predicted a $529 price tag on a 512GB model in late 2025, but in February had revised that upwards to “around $899”. And that was three months ago: things have only gotten worse since then.
But, as Valve’s Lawrence Yang told PC Gamer in May, everyone’s in the same boat. “You know, it’s unavoidable that it will impact basically anything we make that has any of those parts in them. So we’re doing our best to make sure that we can make the product and have it still available at as good and competitive a price as we can. But yeah, it’s challenging for sure,” he said.
