The Steam Machine Is a $1,049 Waitlist, Not a Purchase

The price is the headline, but the button is the story. Valve’s own Steam Machine page lists four models from $1,049 to $1,428, and every one of them joins a waitlist: “you will be notified if units become available.”

So the question this week is not which model to buy. It is which waitlist to join, and whether the one with the controller is worth the extra.

The four models

Model	Valve’s price
512GB	$1,049
512GB with Controller	$1,128
2TB	$1,349
2TB with Controller	$1,428

Two differences fall straight out of that table. The Steam Controller adds $79 at either size, and moving from 512GB to 2TB adds $300. Everything else — processor, graphics, memory — is identical across all four.

On its own, Valve sells the Steam Controller for $99, $20 more than the bundle adds.

That makes the storage step the real decision. The machine has a microSD card slot as well as its NVMe SSD, which is the same arrangement that lets a Steam Deck owner add space without opening anything. Whether $300 for built-in storage beats a card depends on how many large games you keep installed at once, which is a question only your library can answer.

What is inside

Valve lists a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 processor with six cores and twelve threads, semi-custom AMD RDNA3 graphics, 16GB of DDR5 system memory and 8GB of GDDR6 video memory. Connectivity is Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 and gigabit ethernet, with a wireless adapter for the Steam Controller built in. It runs SteamOS 3 in a box Valve describes as roughly a six-inch cube.

Valve’s one performance line is that it has “over six times the horsepower of Steam Deck”. That is Valve’s claim rather than a measurement, and the page does not say which workload it describes.

What the price does not include

A console’s sticker price is rarely what it costs to own, and the Steam Machine has the same shape of extra as any other: more storage later, a second controller, and a place for it on the network. We set out how those add up in what a console costs after the box. Owners of a Deck weighing the two should also know that a dock turns a Deck into a living-room machine for a fraction of this price, with the obvious trade in performance.

If you would rather play in your hands than on a television, our handheld shortlist ranks what the reviews agree on. Valve’s VR headset is sold through a queue as well, and its rules are stricter: a Steam Frame reservation lasts 72 hours.