"Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out that kind of console-style pricing model, saying that the Steam Machine will be "more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market." Griffais said the AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU in the Steam Machine were designed to outperform the bottom 70 percent of machines that opt-in to Valve's regular hardware survey. And Steam Machine owners should expect to pay roughly what they would for desktop hardware with similar specs, he added."
"The new comments follow similar sentiments relayed by Linus Sebastian on a recent episode of his WAN Show podcast. Sebastian said that, when talking to Valve representatives at a preview event, he suggested that a heavily subsidized price point would make the Steam Machine hardware into "a more meaningful product." But when he suggested that he was imagining a console-style price in the range of $500, "nobody said anything, but the energy of the room wasn't great.""
"Based on these comments, we could start estimating a potential Steam Machine price range by speccing out a comparable desktop machine. That would likely require building around a Ryzen 5 7600X CPU and Radeon RX 7600 GPU, which would probably push the overall build into the $700-plus range. That would make the Steam Machine competitive with the pricey PS5 Pro, even though some estimates price out the actual internal Steam Machine components in the $400 to $500 range."
Valve will not adopt a console-style, heavily subsidized pricing model for the Steam Machine and instead plans to price it in the same window as comparable desktop hardware. The Steam Machine uses an AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU configured to outperform roughly the bottom 70 percent of PCs in Valve's hardware survey. Buyers should expect to pay an amount comparable to building a desktop with similar parts. Preview conversations suggested a $500 subsidized price was undesirable to Valve. Comparable desktop builds point toward $700-plus, while some component estimates range $400–$500.
Read at Ars Technica
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