Valve’s Steam Machine Pricing and What Hands-On Tests Revealed About the Tiny Cube with Big Ambitions

Valve recently revealed the price of the Steam Machine this week, after months of suspense from potential buyers. Four variants gives fans several options based on their storage needs and if they want the bundled Steam Controller. Entry-level storage of 512GB costs $1,049, and adding the controller boosts the total to $1,128.

Moving up to 2TB of storage costs $1,349 on its own, or $1,428 with the controller. However, the larger storage models include two more swappable faceplates in addition to the usual black one, a red fabric option and a solid walnut panel, giving you more stylistic options for a living room layout. To be clear, these are the prices you’d pay if you bought the components outright, with no rebates or subsidies.

People who signed up for the interest registration system will receive an email on June 29th with the option to purchase, as well as a shipping update shortly after that. Reviewers who received the units early tested them in real-world settings, such as living rooms. They discovered that it was very compact, measuring only 6 inches on each side and fitting readily into most entertainment centers. A blue glow along the front edge indicates download progress and the like. Faceplates snap on with a magnet, allowing you to change the look to match the room or your preferences. One critic described the whole thing as a quiet achievement of hardware design. Another user noticed that the device remains cool to the touch and makes no fan noise even when heavily loaded with games.

Performance wise, the findings are quite impressive. One reviewer achieved a solid 40 frames per second in Indiana Jones at 1440 resolution on medium settings, and the same was true for Returnal and Forza Horizon 6. The one thing that did get pushed was Cyberpunk 2077, which played at 4K with high settings but remained playable. Upscaling solutions such as AMD FSR were useful for increasing the resolution without compromising other games. The gear appeared to be operating at perfectly safe temperatures, with no noticeable fan noise.

The base is SteamOS, which allows you to browse the Steam library and a variety of other stores via the desktop mode. On the other hand, most games require some personal tuning to get them to perform properly because auto settings are simply not accessible. It also turns out that a few games with specific anti-cheat technologies are either off limits or pose some risk. One issue we discovered was that there were some bugs with sleep mode, which made it difficult to resume a game after a long break.

Despite these minor quibbles, the device has some useful capabilities, such as HDMI CEC support, which allows it to wake up the television and communicate with the controller in most settings. For those who already have a large collection of Steam games, this is likely to be a big winner. The mix of size, performance, and game support is a really appealing alternative. More units will be distributed to reviewers and customers as the waitlist grows.