Valve updated their article about when the Steam Machine/Controller/Frame will ship.
Previous message:
We hope to ship in 2026, but as we shared recently, memory and storage shortages have created challenges for us. We’ll share updates publicly when we finalize our plans!
New message:
We shared recently that there have been challenges with memory and storage shortages, but we will be shipping all three products this year. More updates will be shared as we finalize our plans.
How to pre-order, if Valve even does not know what price the machine will end up? At the time of sending the machines, the price could go up for Valve very high and people have pre-ordered for wrong price. That means everyone who pre-ordered would get a price hike and in general a bad publicity. Pre-ordering anything is a bad thing if you don’t know the end product well. And combine it at these high prices in uncertainty times like these…
Valve should not make any promises or pre-orders right now. It would be the wrong thing to do.
They must already have stock in their warehouse, so they can just set the right price.
And for the next batch they set the price again.
So I meant less pre-order and more let people order in batches with adjusted price.
I don’t think Valve has stock in warehouse already, I doubt that. They need to figure out pricing before committing. This is not a situation like Nintendo Switch, where they need to have millions at launch and more and be sure to sell them all. Also other companies get better deals and probably Valve needs to wait, or pay more to have higher priority to build them.
Of course they already have stock, the original launch date was Q1 2026 (which ends in 3 weeks). They might not have a ton of devices, but they do have stock. Same way they have been sending out dev kits.
RAM has spiked since November/December, before that it was cheap. I got my 2x32 GB 6000 CL30 RAM for 200€.
Valve has the issue that they could deliver the first batch for “cheap”, but then every unit they produce afterwards suddenly costs a chunk more (like 200-300€). So it’s either a paper launch or they’d have to raise the price above the Index, which won’t lead to good PR.