Valve’s announcement of the Steam Machine has sparked much debate online about the company’s return to the PC in the living room space, but one key piece of information remains unknown: price.

The Steam Machine is a gaming-focused PC designed to be more accessible than a standard desktop PC, with a sleek, cube-like design and SteamOS on-board. We here at IGN have offered our thoughts on how much the Steam Machine will cost, suggesting it’ll probably be higher than people think. But chatter about pricing has ramped up again after Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips recalled a conversation he had about the subject with Valve itself ahead of the Steam Machine reveal.

On a recent episode of the WAN Show, Linus recalled that he had expressed his disappointment to Valve that Steam Machine wouldn’t follow a console pricing model where it is subsidized by the manufacturer because it takes a 30% cut of sales made on the platform, as the likes of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo do with their consoles.

Linus said he was then asked by Valve what he meant by a “console price,” to which he responded $500. “Nobody said anything, but the energy of the room wasn't great,” Linus continued.

Here are the comments in full:

“So basically, it's a 7600 CPU and a 7600 GPU. This is not a super powerful machine. Valve is upfront saying that they are going to be relying on FSR in order to achieve 4K. And even then man, like 8 gigs of VRAM, anyone else would be taking a ton of flak for shipping a game console today with 8 gigs of VRAM.

“I can’t tell you what the price will be because I literally don't know but, when I said, ‘I'm disappointed that it isn't going to follow a console pricing model where it's subsidized by the fact that the manufacturer is going to be taking 30% of every game sold on it over the lifespan of this thing, because I feel that would be a more meaningful product,’ they kind of asked what I meant by, well, ‘what do you mean by console price?’ And I said, ‘Well, $500.’

“Nobody said anything, but the energy of the room wasn't great.”

It is highly unlikely that Steam Machine will cost $500, then. But is that surprising? When we asked Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat about what the company was shooting for, he told us 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.”

And while Linus has suggested Valve won’t benefit from a subsidized business model in the way, say, Sony does with PlayStation, because Steam Machine comes with SteamOS and the vast majority of users will use Steam itself as the storefront from which to buy their games, Valve can effectively do the same thing.

We’ve suggested Steam Machine will cost $700-$800. To put that into perspective, the base PS5 with a disc drive currently costs $549.99, while the PS5 Digital Edition costs $499.99. The PS5 Pro, meanwhile, costs $749.99. But what do you think?

We’ve got plenty more on all Valve’s recent hardware announcements, and have a handy roundup so you don’t miss a thing. We went hands-on with Steam Machine and Steam Controller, and if you’re wondering about Steam Deck 2, we asked Valve about that as well.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].