Valve announced a new Steam Machine this week, and while I think it’s going to have a major impact on the next generation of gaming hardware – however PC-like that looks – there’s still one big question mark looming over the little game cube. How much will it cost? The price is seemingly the one thing Valve didn’t reveal when it announced its new system, but it did give us some hints.

Namely, the Steam Machine is equipped with the equivalent of a mobile Radeon RX 7600, albeit with a much higher TDP (thermal design power). When I was in Bellevue looking at the Steam Machine a couple of weeks ago, I was told that while there wasn’t a price, it would be similar to a “similarly specced gaming PC.”

And there is reason to believe that Valve wants to keep the pricing reasonable. When I asked Valve Hardware Engineer Yazan Aldehayyat about the pricing goals, he told me that “[Affordability] is just something we thought about every time we made a hardware decision, a feature decision, is to make sure we keep it as approachable, as affordable as possible.” While that alone doesn’t mean the Steam Machine is going to be affordable it does fall in line with how the company approached Steam Deck pricing – which is still the most affordable handheld gaming PC ever launched.

"An Equivalent PC”

If the Steam Machine is going to be competitive with gaming PCs with similar performance and specs, what does that mean? Well, there’s a lot to unpack here. The Steam Machine is equipped with a 6-core Zen 4 CPU and a RDNA 3 GPU with 28 Compute Units. In terms of desktop hardware, that would make it roughly equivalent to an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X and a Radeon RX 7600M – both of which are pretty affordable, at least compared with other components.

I went ahead and priced out an equivalent PC on PCPartPicker, and ended up with a build that costs about $913 at the time of writing. That seems like a lot, but it’s actually an imperfect comparison due to the size constraints of the Steam Machine, which is essentially a 6-inch cube. That’s less of a desktop PC chassis and more of a mini gaming PC, most of which use mobile-class hardware to fit into a small chassis – and the Steam Machine is no different.

You see, the Radeon RX 7600 for desktop has 32 Compute Units with a 165W TDP, which is a bit more powerful than the 28 CU GPU found in the Steam Machine – and it also has a higher default power level. The 7600M, however, is built on the same graphics architecture as Valve’s custom-made chip, and has the same 28 CUs, but usually operates at a much lower 90W TDP. So, the Steam Machine is running on what’s essentially an overclocked laptop chip. How much would an equivalent gaming laptop cost? Well, right now there basically aren’t any, so it’s perhaps better to look at laptops with a 6-core processor, 16GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060.

Right now, you can find something like the MSI Thin B13VF, with a Core i5-13420H, 16GB of RAM, an RTX 4060 and 512GB of RAM for around $780. That almost exactly lines up with the Steam Machine’s actual specs – and that’s with a monitor stapled onto it.

Realistically, the Steam Machine is probably going to land somewhere between the laptop and the desktop in terms of what it’s capable of, due to the greater amount of electricity being pumped into it. There is a third class of computers that already occupies this middle ground: mini PCs and NUCs.

The NUC Problem

Intel initially came out with the NUC (Next Unit of Computing) back in 2013. These were essentially tiny barebones PCs with laptop chips that asked you to bring your own SSD and RAM. Intel doesn’t make them anymore, and has since essentially sold the concept off to Asus, which now makes gaming NUCs – I even reviewed one last year. But it’s expensive.

The Asus ROG NUC I reviewed last year actually starts off with specs very similar to the Steam Machine. It started with an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor, a mobile-class RTX 4060 and 16GB of RAM. It even came in a chassis that’s not much larger than the Steam Machine, even if it was more of a rectangle. The problem was the price: The ROG NUC started at $1,629. I’m pretty sure that if the Steam Machine launched early next year with that kind of price tag it’d be dead on arrival.

Unfortunately, that kind of high price comes with the mini gaming PC territory. We just reviewed the GMKTec Evo-X2, which doesn’t carry the same kind of name recognition as Asus ROG. That mini PC costs $1,499 to start, though, and it’s equipped with – admittedly powerful – integrated graphics and 64GB of RAM.

I don’t think the Steam Machine is going to cost as much as one of these mini PCs, largely because most mini PCs are marketed to professionals that just need a tiny little PC on their desk to power through creative or AI workloads. And even if the cost of engineering these powerful components into such a tiny box would raise the price tag a bit, Valve has a secret weapon that most PC manufacturers don’t – it owns Steam.

Steam Is Everything

Because SteamOS basically railroads you into Steam the second you load the operating system up, and barely – if ever – requires you to go to the actual desktop, most Steam Machine users will primarily be buying and playing games on Steam. Don’t forget that Epic tried to make Epic Games Store exclusives a thing because of Valve’s high margin on software sales. If the Steam Machine sells a lot of units, Valve can essentially subsidize the cost of the hardware through all the cash it’ll make from you buying games.

After all, this is essentially what console-makers have always done in the past. Console hardware is so affordable because every game that’s sold for those platforms earns Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo a bit of cash. The only real difference is that you can just wipe SteamOS off of the Steam Machine and install Windows, which probably affects the math a little bit. I just don’t know by how much.

And speaking of Windows, that’s another reason why Valve may be willing to shave down its profit margin – to stave off the oncoming threat of Xbox. Steam is currently by far the most popular digital game store on PC, but Microsoft and its PC-like next-gen Xbox is looking to lure more gamers over to the Microsoft Store and its “Play Anywhere” promises. More games sold on the Microsoft Store means fewer games sold on Steam, which means less money for Valve. But by planting a flag with the Steam Machine, Valve keeps those PC gamers in the Steam ecosystem and that sweet 30% cut on software sales rolling in.

That’s exactly what Valve did with the Steam Deck though. Gabe Newell famously told us that hitting its $400 price was “painful” but “critical.” However painful it was, it worked, and now “Steam Deck” is practically synonymous with handheld PC gaming.

Ultimately, no one will actually know how much the Steam Machine will cost until Valve shares the price. My initial gut feeling was somewhere around $1,000 when I heard that it’d be priced similarly to the same class of hardware. But realistically it’ll likely be around $700-800, depending on how much tariffs get worked into the equation – maybe $600 if Valve is willing to get really aggressive. While I know a lot of people are hoping that it stays below $500, I just don’t see it happening. I’d love to be proven wrong, though.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra