Valve comments on Steam Machine price, hints at affordability

Valve has unveiled the Steam Machine, a new dedicated PC system that looks and behaves like a console. Valve's announcement showcased a wide selection of features, along with a target release window, but didn't mention pricing.

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However, Valve's Hardware Engineer, Yazan Aldehayyat, spoke to IGN about the upcoming PC/console hybrid and touched on what Valve is considering with price. According to the engineer, Valve believes this is the right time to release the Steam Machine, given how much it would cost someone to build a PC with similar performance and features to the hybrid device, and at the heart of the design is affordability.

Aldehayyat said that affordability is a factor Valve considers heavily every time it introduces a new piece of hardware. When it comes to the Steam Machine, it's planning to make it as affordable as possible.

"If you're trying to make a PC that has similar features and similar performance, I think the Steam Machine is going to be a really competitive price to that and provide really good value to it. The affordability piece you mentioned is one of the reasons why we think a Steam Machine makes a lot of sense right now. So it's just something that we thought about every time we made a hardware decision, a feature decision, is to make sure that we keep it as approachable, as affordable as possible," said Aldehayyat

Aldehayyat didn't give an exact figure, but given the specifications of the Steam Machine and what the tech experts over at Digital Foundry have estimated based on the early test time they had with the Steam Machine alongside Valve, the Steam Machine is expected to land somewhere in between the Xbox Series S and the PlayStation 5 when it comes to performance. With it more than likely falling closer to the latter than the former.

If that is the case, the Steam Machine could be priced between the $379.99 mark, which is the current price of the Xbox Series S, and the PlayStation 5 digital edition, which is currently $499.99.