Credit: Valve

When Valve announced its Steam Machine desktop PC and Steam Frame VR headset in mid-November of last year, it declined to announce pricing or availability information for either device. That was partly because RAM and storage prices had already begun to climb, thanks to shortages caused by the AI industry’s insatiable need for memory. Those price spikes have only gotten worse since then, and they’re beginning to trickle down to GPUs and other devices that use memory chips.

This week, Valve has officially announced that it’s still not ready to make an official announcement about when the Machine or Frame will be available or what they’ll cost.

Valve says it still plans to launch both devices (as well as the new Steam Controller) “in the first half of the year,” but that uncertainty around RAM and storage prices mean that Valve “[has] work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of these things can change.”

“When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now,” Valve’s blog post reads. “But the memory and storage shortages you’ve likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame).”

Valve has been consistent in saying that it expects the Steam Machine to be priced like a comparably specced gaming PC. For better or worse, we can probably expect the pricing to go up and down as pricing for PC components goes up and down.

For impatient SteamOS enthusiasts, we’ve had some success with homemade (or at least home-bought) Steam Machines made from the same commodity AMD hardware that Valve and other PC builders are using for the Steam Deck and its small army of clones. We did find some issues with running current SteamOS versions on dedicated GPUs—both that games often ran slower than they did on Windows, and that GPUs with 8GB of graphics RAM did even worse.

Valve told us that it was working on memory management improvements for the Steam Machine launch that should address some of the problems we found. Today’s blog post also mentions that Valve is working on “investigating improved upscaling” and “optimizing ray tracing performance in the driver” to help improve performance on the Steam Machine—when that work is done, it should benefit self-built Steam Machines with similar hardware, too.