Valve, like other companies, is stuck with take-it-or-leave it prices.

Valve’s Steam Machine finally has a price: a whopping $1,049 for the 512GB configuration or $1,349 for the 2TB version. And those are without bundled controllers, which drive up the cost more.

The prices are so high in part because Valve isn’t subsidizing the hardware, and the company has already indicated that the component crisis forced it to reconsider its initial pricing plans. In an interview with the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, Valve engineers discussed the reality of sourcing RAM in 2026, with take-it-or-leave-it prices as memory and other components remain in short supply, from only a few vendors like Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix.

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Valve, of course, isn’t the only company in a bind over memory shortages, as the crunch is forcing many hardware makers to make significant pricing changes. Even Apple CEO Tim Cook is warning of incoming price hikes for iPhones, Macs, and other devices. And the RAM crunch isn’t projected to get better anytime soon.

  • Akrenion@slrpnk.netEnglish
    31·
    10 hours ago

    This way they can rent put computer instead of you owning the means to do so yourself. This is what happens when you price out consumers. You bind them to your terms with leverage to pay for your past Investments payed by future earnings.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      10 hours ago

      I mean, how long does a consumer CPU last? 10 years? 15? Datacenter measures don’t count, since they always push 100% load at max feasible temperature. And RAM holds even longer. And DDR3 is good enough for general computing, even with all the bloat.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        9 hours ago

        Yeah, the weakness of the “this is all a massive conspiracy to force consumers to rent all their computing power” theory is that old computers work just fine as long as you don’t try and install a newer Windows.

        We’re maybe 2 decades past the point were you had to upgrade your PC every 5 years for it to be suitable for everyday computing usage. There are only two things pushing PC hardware upgrades nowadays:

        • OS support time limits and the ever expanding bloat of newer OS versions (which is nowhere as much a problem if your OS is Linux)
        • Games

        Now, for Games, all attempts at getting gamers to have their games hosted in servers and playing on light PCs - most notably Stadia - failed miserably.

        As for OS, how successful has Microsoft been at getting people to actually upgrade to Windows 11, especially since hardware prices shot up?

        I think it’s far more likely that people just keep on using their aged hardware more often than not with no longer updated OS versions, than it is for them to actually start paying subscriptions to use remote computing power to browse the web and read their e-mails, especially since that still needs some form of local hardware so doesn’t totally solve their problem with expensive hardware.

      • Akrenion@slrpnk.netEnglish
        21·
        10 hours ago

        I am gaming on ddr4 RAM and an rtx2070 from 2015. However CPU loads are high running a lot of games. I got a few friends who want to upgrade their motherboard but can not reasonably afford ddr5. Most of my non-gaming acquaintances do not own anything more than a phone or tablet anymore.