The Daily Populous Tuesday June 23rd, 2026 night edition
Authored by theverge.com and submitted by esporx

is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.

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After months of waiting, Valve has finally announced that the Steam Machine, its new living room-friendly PC, will start at $1,049 and go on sale beginning June 29th.

You can now register your interest to buy a Steam Machine as part of a reservation system. To offer a fair playing field for people who want to buy one, Valve will randomize everyone in the queue on Thursday at 1PM ET. After that, anyone who registers their interest will be added to the end of the waitlist. The first emails giving people the opportunity to buy will go out on June 29th.

Valve will sell four configurations of the Steam Machine:

A 512GB model for $1,049 / $1,509 CAD / €1,039 / £879 / $1,609 AUD / 4,389 zlotys

A 512GB model with a bundled Steam Controller for $1,128 / $1,628 CAD / €1,108 / £938 / $1,728 AUD / 4,698 zlotys

A 2TB model for $1,349 / $1,919 CAD / €1,359 / £1,149 / $2,109 AUD / 5,739 zlotys

A 2TB model with a bundled Steam Controller for $1,428 / $2,038 CAD / €1,428 / £1,208 / $2,228 AUD / 6,048 zlotys

The 2TB configurations will also come with two swappable faceplates, “red fabric” and “solid walnut,” in addition to the standard black one.

The Steam Machine is considerably more expensive than the consoles it’s arguably competing with: A digital PS5 costs $599.99, an Xbox Series X costs $649.99, and a PS5 Pro costs $899.99. (And that’s after they all got price hikes.) The Steam Machine also isn’t meaningfully improved over those options; based on my colleague Sean Hollister’s review, the Steam Machine’s performance is roughly equivalent to that of a PS5, but nearly six years after the PS5 first launched.

However, the value proposition for the Steam Machine is that it can play your library of Steam games you may have accumulated over years (or even decades), rather than just PlayStation games, and it’s also a full Linux PC that you can customize to your heart’s content. Valve also says that it’s selling the Steam Machine for the cost of its components alone instead of subsidizing the price.

The price of the Steam Machine has been one of the biggest questions about the new hardware since it was announced. Valve let us spend hours with the Steam Machine, the new Steam Controller, and the Steam Frame VR headset in late 2025, and we walked away impressed. At the time of that hands-on, Valve said that it would start shipping the new gadgets in early 2026. But in February, the company announced that the ongoing memory and storage crunch had forced it to revisit its pricing and shipping plans. And in March, Valve said in a blog post that it would be “shipping all three products this year.”

Valve did end up releasing the Steam Controller separately from its other hardware in May, and it’s quite good. The controller quickly sold out when it first went on sale, and Valve opened a reservations queue soon after.

Valve still hasn’t shared specific pricing or release details for the Steam Frame.

charathedemoncat on June 22nd, 2026 at 17:27 UTC »

I thought as much, ill just wait and hope the ai bubble pops

ZenkaiZ on June 22nd, 2026 at 17:22 UTC »

Why does this feel $200 more expensive than 999

Embarrassed-Part-890 on June 22nd, 2026 at 17:18 UTC »

Now that $600 ps5 ain’t looking that bad lol