A senior Valve official said: steam machineA release date announcement is getting closer, with only one hurdle remaining between the company's new gaming hardware and consumers. In the meantime, the new controller, which was originally announced alongside the Steam Machine, is expected to hit the market in early May 2026.
Valve unveiled the Steam Machine in November 2025, along with the Steam Frame VR headset and Steam Controller. All three were scheduled for release in 2026. Half a year later, the company announced that the Steam Controller would be released on May 4th and would cost $99.99. No date or price has been set for Steam Machine.
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Valve Dev says 'everything is going well' with the Steam Machine.
One encouraging sign was shared by Valve veteran and SteamOS developer Pierre-Loup Griffais, who helped port Source Engine and Steam to Linux. In a recent interview with IGN, Griffais said he expects Valve to share Steam Machine news soon and that “things are generally going well” with the pre-release pipeline. Engineers identified supply chain logistics as the only remaining obstacle. “This is really about the logistics of getting it into the hands of the user,” Griffais said.
The stated framing indicates that the hardware itself is effectively complete. Underscoring this point, Griffais compared the Steam Machine experience to Steam Deck in docked mode, which many existing Valve customers already have access to. He said anyone who has tried that setup will have a good idea of what Steam Machine will feel like with new hardware that adds meaningfully more GPU horsepower. The overall gap is still significant, as Steam Machines pack more power than their small physical footprint might initially suggest. Combining 16GB of RAM with a custom RDNA3 GPU, 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, and a Zen 4 processor clocked up to 4.8GHz, it's significantly better than Deck's RDNA2 silicon and its 16GB shared system and video memory pool.
Griffais also said that the Steam Controller was intentionally released before the Steam Machine, depicting PC users as the primary audience for the peripheral, and that Valve did not want to wait for a larger product. With the controller currently dated, Griffais' comments point out that the Steam Machine is still on track for 2026 as the next of the three product launches Valve recently confirmed.
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Due to the release of the Steam Controller, you may not receive much advance notice before Steam Machine launches. On the other hand, as the most expensive product of the trio, its early momentum may rely more heavily on pre-orders, which could give Valve an incentive to offer a more substantial pre-release period. To be clear, the company does not offer pre-orders for the Steam Controller. Valve's digital storefront still lists both Steam Machine and Steam Frame as “coming soon,” a label that applies from late 2025. Since Valve announced both devices along with the Steam Controller, many fans initially assumed that all three devices would be released at the same time. However, recent developments point to each product being released separately now.
