If you want Valve’s 6×6-inch PC/console hybrid, you’ll have to spend at least $1,050. But if you want a “Steam Machine,” in the abstract sense, you don’t have to stick with Valve’s own hardware. In today’s RAM-ravaged wasteland of PC prices, you may be better off cobbling some other system together that you can also turn into a gaming device.
Valve is well aware that the cost of its upcoming Steam Machine, which is set to start shipping June 29, is obscene. In its blog post announcing the price, the company wrote, “our original goal for the price of the Steam Machine is no longer viable.” While console makers, like Xbox or Sony’s PlayStation, subsidize their hardware to a certain degree, Valve is explicitly treating this like a PC, saying the cost “reflects the price of the components as we’ve secured them over the past [six] months.” In a statement to The Verge, Valve said, “When companies sell their hardware under cost for competitive advantage, or buy exclusive content for it, they’re doing that to build a more closed system, one where you don’t get to choose what software you want to use.” Meanwhile, one of the company’s software engineers, Yazan Aldehayyat, told Tom’s Hardware that, unlike consoles, their Steam Machine is “not subsidized by software sales.”
