Recently, Valve dropped the price point, main features, and release date of the first of three new pieces of hardware set to be released some time in the first half of this year. The new Steam Controller arrives on the 4th of May, but we're still lacking release dates for the new Steam Frame, and highly anticipated Steam Machine.
According to Valve leaker Brad Lynch, the rising costs and shortages of RAM across the globe has led to the Steam Machine skyrocketing in price internally. The Steam Frame is less affected, but will still see an increase.
The problem is that we don't know what the price point was set at before AI data centres decided they needed all the RAM in the world to function. So, it's hard to say how much of a difference in price we'll see compared to Valve's initial, internal figure.
All we do know is that the Steam Controller is coming out soon. Speaking to Polygon, Valve hardware engineer Steve Cardinali explained why the hardware accessory was released first:
"This doesn't have RAM in it, and it's not as complicated to start getting out the door for us. We're ready for it. We wanted to build up quantity so that we could try to address everybody who wants one at launch, but it's possible that the demand for it far exceeds our expectations...We had always thought, obviously we want them to work together well — especially the Steam Machine and the Steam Controller, they're in a lot of ways a pair made in heaven — but we saw no need to ship the Controller at the same time as the Machine. The really only hard deadline is we didn't want to ship the Steam Machine before the Steam Controller. We want to have that out for the Steam Machine... It wasn't really ever the plan to ship them together unless it landed nicely that way"
