5 Things You Need To Know Before Buying A Steam Machine

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Valve’s Steam Machine is the company’s latest major hardware launch since the Steam Deck handheld in 2022. There are a lot of caveats to Valve’s small-form-factor PC, much like the Deck, but its pricing altered the entire conversation around it. Valve has made it clear that it had no way to reduce the PC’s price tag, which starts at $1,049 for 512GB of storage and no controller. The company is at the mercy of the RAM and SSD pricing crisis caused by the high demand for AI data centers.

The Steam Machine could have been a solid entry-level PC for a lot of people. In benchmark testing, the system fails to live up to big-budget PCs, and its performance is comparable to PCs with low-end graphics cards like the Nvidia RTX 5050. If the Steam Machine had been sold at its originally envisioned price of $750, it would have been a much easier pill to swallow. Today, it’s a system you almost have to be briefed on before diving in.

That’s not including the fact that it ships with SteamOS, a Linux distribution built on top of Arch Linux. This is its own kettle of fish, and something you’ll need to bear in mind depending on the games you enjoy. It’s also just a PC at the end of the day, so that comes with its own learning curve if you’ve never stepped foot into the world of PC gaming before.